Need to test FFMPEG thumbnails for certain videos failing only on external storage

I’m having a bizarre issue. I have movie thumbnails enabled. I have external and local storage folders. Here what is happening:

  • I have two MP4 videos. Both are the same codec (H264, MPEG-4 AVC, AAC audio), roughly the same dimensions/size (only a few megs each) but are from different devices.
  • When both are placed in the same folder on the external/network SMB share, only one of the two creates a thumbnail.
  • What’s even weirder, is if I copy the two files to a local folder (on the same NC server), the thumbnails work perfectly.

At first I thought it as permissions, but both appear identical. It’s not a codec issue because thumbnails can be created with moved locally.

In the “preview” folder, I see the folder for the ID of the file WITHOUT the thumbnail is still created, but it is blank. I’m not seeing anything odd, such as database oc_filecache corruption (every entry corresponds to a valid file).

I see no errors in apache2 or nextcloud logs that would indicate a problem. It’s simply NOT creating thumbnails for some files. ALSO, it isn’t just for this file. There are select other files that it does not create a thumbnail for - these just happen to be two I’m testing. Also, I have absolutely no issues generating thumbnails for IMAGES from any source (external or local) - it’s just video…

Is it possible to test the output of FFMPEG against a file from the SMB external share - exactly as NC would? Again, the same file that would refuse to generate a preview, when viewed on an external SMB share, does work only if I move/copy that file to a local folder.

From my config.php:

‘enabledPreviewProviders’ =>
array (
0 => ‘OC\Preview\PNG’,
1 => ‘OC\Preview\JPEG’,
2 => ‘OC\Preview\GIF’,
3 => ‘OC\Preview\BMP’,
4 => ‘OC\Preview\MarkDown’,
5 => ‘OC\Preview\TXT’,
6 => ‘OC\Preview\SVG’,
7 => ‘OC\Preview\TIFF’,
8 => ‘OC\Preview\Movie’,
9 => ‘OC\Preview\MP4’,
10 => ‘OC\Preview\MKV’,
11 => ‘OC\Preview\AVI’
),
‘preview_max_x’ => ‘1000’,
‘preview_max_y’ => ‘1000’,
‘jpeg_quality’ => ‘60’,

Nextcloud version : 18.0.1.3
Operating system and version; Ubuntu 18.04
Apache or nginx version: latest
PHP version : 7.2

Thanks in advance!

Bumping this. It seems FFMPEG has an issue with loading video files over SMB when they are over 5MB. I’ve confirmed this using multiple smaller videos.

Is there any way to override this restriction?

Example of behavior: https://gitmemory.com/issue/nextcloud/server/1475/619040509

I have the exact same problem, I hadn´t realized that <5mb SMB videos are the ones which has thumbnail/preview. Is there a solution?