ScreenGen, how to easily create a thumbnail from a video with Linux

Sep 052013

Original article by Roberto Ferramosca, published in Italian on lffl.org

ScreenGen is a useful software with which we can easily create an image with various thumbnail of a video ready to be shared or stored in our blogs, forums etc..

In the last years we have seen a lot of hype on the net about services dedicated to sharing videos, as any simple smartphone can quickly create a video and share it with our friends on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc..
On the net you can find very often images containing various thumbnail of a video, that allow us to have information about the video file we want to download, for example. To quickly create various thumbnail of a video and then group them into a single image we can use on Linux ScreenGen.

ScreenGen is a useful open source command line application that allows us to quickly create various thumbnail of a video ready to be shared or uploaded on our blog, website etc..
Some special features of ScreenGen is its ease of use and speed of image creation, in a few seconds we will have our picture with info on the video and its thumbnails. By default ScreenGen includes details on the video as the title, size, audio and video codecs, total time, etc. and 12 previews created at fixed time intervals.
And it’s possible to modify the information of the video, customize the font, size and the number of miniatures etc. all with ease directly with the command for creating the video.

ScreenGen is available through AUR for Arch Linux or via a PPA for Ubuntu and derivatives (including Linux Mint and elementary OS) typing in a terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:samrog131/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install screengen

once you have installed ScreenGen just type in the folder where you have your video video folder screengen followed by the name of the video, as example for the video lffl.avi we should type: