Alfresco Video Thumbnails

It seems like every 6 months to never I hear: “The Alfresco thumbnails forge project used to be cool man, what happened?”  Chill Winston, it’s still cool.

Now that Alfresco has a native implementation of thumbnails is the forge project still needed?  Well, ‘needed’ is relative I suppose, but check out what the project gets you beyond the basic Alfresco distribution:

• Thumbnails when browsing, searching, or viewing a document in Alfresco Explorer (i.e. not Share)
• CoolIris view when browsing or searching in Alfresco Explorer (which is sweet)
• Actions to force the creation or update of thumbnails using Alfresco’s native thumbnail service
• A video transformer based on ffmpeg with the ability to specify an offset (also sweet)
• A patch to delete and regenerate thumbnails created by old versions of the forge project (Admittedly, not that awesome, but useful nonetheless.  No one wants a messy bloated repo.)

There’s also several goodies on the roadmap for future releases of the project including Share mods.

So what are you waiting for? Go manage your modules and pop that amp into your war (for the non-geeks, I promise that’s not gross).