Video thumbnails with FFmpeg and Paperclip – Ruby on Rails, JRuby, AWS, EC2, Exalead

We’ve spent the last few weeks working on a new Rails app for a film and photography site and, as you might expect from my recent posts, we’re using Paperclip to handle file uploads.

Without any more effort than a script/install of Paperclip we get thumbnailing of images and PDFs, but what about thumbnailing the video files that will be uploaded to the site? Enter FFmpeg.