Does anyone know how to change the movie thumbnail

Dec 27, 2010

These forums are so helpful. Thanks everyone for all the advice lately! Now I have a new question. In my presentation, my player includes the "Thumbnails" tab in the sidebar. One slide 5, I have an FLV. When I look at the thumbnail for that slide in the sidebar of my published course, I'm seeing a dark-gray placeholder box where my movie was inserted. I'm trying to avoid my learners seeing that placeholder in the thumbnails... instead I want it to show the first frame of my video. How do I do that?

5 Replies
Bob Lander

Yeah, the thumbnail will show that placeholder image unless you use a workaround to replace it. Here's what you can do:

  1. Open a new presentation & put something on the slide that you want to use as the thumbnail. For example you could do a screencapture of the very beginning of your video.
  2. Publish that new presentation and go to the data/swf folder of the new presentation.
  3. Find the file called tb1.swf (which is the thumbnail for slide 1 of your new presentation). Rename it to tb5.swf and copy it to your clip board.
  4. Now go to the published output of your "real" presentation. Findthe data/swf folder of your presentation and paste the new tb5.swf into it. It'll replace the thumbnail currently used for slide 5. So basically you've just replaced the old thumbnail that has the gray video thing on it, with a new one.

Gabe did a screencast on this awhile back, so maybe it'll help to see the steps visually: https://player.vimeo.com/video/149172099

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