Change the thumbnail page layout

What if you don’t like the number of rows and columns that CLAutoThumbnailer automatically decides to create? For example, the thumbnails are a bit too tiny for your tastes — though personally, I like to see lot’s of Overview thumbnails.

CLAutoThumbnailer uses the video aspect ratio to determine whether to give priority to the number of rows or number of columns on a page. Normally Row Priority is used to specify the number of rows desired. Squarish videos (whose aspect ratio is less than the aspect ratio of the desired thumbnail page) will instead use Column Priority.

Run the following command to say we want either 9 columns or 9 rows instead of the default 12:

clatn -i 0 -s 0:0:59 -e 1:31:07 -n 9 "his_girl_friday_512kb.mp4"

By examining CLAutoThumbnailer.log (or turning on more verbose output by using the --debug option) we can see what CLAutoThumbnailer looks at when determing the final layout:

Auto Row Priority Layout (aspect ratio 1.33 >= 1.275), using 9 rows
  1.33 aspect ratio
  Wasted width 0.793 > 0.600, increased columns:  9x9 0.000x0.251
Generating 81 141x106 thumbnails on a 9x9 Overview page.

Here’s the new thumbnail page:

9 Row Overview Thumbnail Page for “His Girl Friday”

Do the same for “McLintock!” with:

clatn -i 0 -s 0:1:59 -e 2:06:39 -n 9 McLintock_512kb.mp4

and CLAutoThumbnailer reports:

Auto Row Priority Layout (aspect ratio 2.32 >= 1.275), using 9 rows
  2.32 aspect ratio
  5 columns is good enough, wasted width 0.088 <= 0.600
  5x9 0.088x0.000
Generating 45 246x106 thumbnails on a 5x9 Overview page.

which results in:

9 Row Overview Thumbnail Page for “McLintock!”