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Martchus / tageditor

A tag editor with Qt GUI and command-line interface supporting MP4/M4A/AAC (iTunes), ID3, Vorbis, Opus, FLAC and Matroska
GNU General Public License v2.0
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inquiry: thumbnails for mpeg files #101

Closed boldcompany closed 1 year ago

boldcompany commented 1 year ago

Windows automatically generates thumbnails for mpeg (.mpg) files.

It seems the mpeg specification does not support tagging. Obviously, a user can run a utility to apply non-standard tags to a .mpg file, but software may not recognize tags applied in this way.

Preferring a clean, standard approach, what is the best way to change the thumbnails, setting custom thumbnails for .mpg files such that Windows displays the new thumbnails in File Explorer icon views?

Martchus commented 1 year ago

The formal name of the format you mean with "mpeg files" is "MPEG Program Stream". This format is not supported by this tag editor and as far as I know does not even support storing this kind of tag information (as you already stated).

I don't know what formats the Windows Explorer can read the cover/thumbnail from except MP4. Possibly it also supports Matroska. Both container formats should support the video/audio streams that your MPEG Program Stream contains. So you could remux your video/audio content to MP4 and then just add a cover tag. This would just be remuxing, not a transcoding of the actual video/audio streams. You could also give Matroska a shot where the cover is usually added as an attachment (see https://matroska.org/technical/attachments.html). Both formats can be muxed with ffmpeg (when using -c copy ffmpeg will not transcode the video/audio streams). You could also use the format-specific tools mp4box and mkvtoolnix.

boldcompany commented 1 year ago

Thank you very much for this helpful, thorough answer!