A frame taken out of a video is kept for good: that is what makes a dead
favorite cheap to scroll past, and it is also the one thing that can go wrong
with no way out. A picture from the wrong moment, or one kept by a version of
this that would keep a frame with nothing in it, stays on the card for the life
of the item.
So Settings grows a Captured Thumbnails section: what is kept and how much room
it takes, and a button that throws the lot away. The cards on screen go back to
the start of the thumbnail ladder rather than waiting to be scrolled out of the
window and back, which is where a fresh capture comes from, and the session's
memory of which items there was no point asking about goes with the pictures --
otherwise "take them again" would quietly skip every item that failed once.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MPZFnNdHbPGDTqQUNiE4ZN
A favorite whose thumbnail is gone gets a frame out of the video instead. The
one this came from got a black box: 1.6 KB of pure black, kept for good, on an
item whose video is black nowhere -- ffmpeg puts its opening frame at YAVG 185
and its quarter mark at 130.
So that was not a frame of the video at all. Drawing a video element that has
not presented a frame gives back the canvas untouched, and transparent black
JPEGs as pure black at about 1.6 KB -- comfortably past the only test a capture
had to pass, which was being over 512 bytes long. Nothing then asked whether
the picture had anything in it, and the cache exists precisely so that nothing
asks again.
The frame now has to be a picture of something, and both ways it can fail to be
one have the same answer: take it somewhere else. The brightest sample in the
drawn frame decides -- an untouched canvas has no painted pixels at all, and a
frame that genuinely is black (a lead-in, a fade, a cut) is no better a
thumbnail than one of nothing. A blank frame moves on: the quarter mark again
with the element playing, since an element that is playing has to present
frames while a seeked one does not, and then the half mark. The frame is taken
on `requestVideoFrameCallback` where there is one -- the browser saying a frame
is on screen now -- rather than on `seeked` alone, which Chromium backs with a
decoded frame but Safari does not for an element that is off-screen and paused.
Nobody will say how long this item is (the extractor reports no duration and
the favorite kept a zero), and a clip with no length had no quarter mark to
seek to, so the capture settled for the first frame the element decoded -- the
opening one, which is the frame most likely to be black. It now seeks blind to
a fixed mark, clamped back into the file if that is past the end.
And the black pictures already kept heal: an index entry carries a marker
saying its picture was checked, every capture writes one, and an entry without
one is measured once -- behind the picture the card has already painted -- then
dropped and taken again if it turns out to be a frame of nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MPZFnNdHbPGDTqQUNiE4ZN
A favorite outlives its thumbnail. Sources sign their CDN paths and the
signature expires, so a video kept months ago has a `thumb` that 404s and
a card that is a grey box with a title under it. Asking the source page
for a fresh picture covers the case where the page still exists; nothing
covered the case where it doesn't.
The video does, because playback re-resolves from the page URL every time.
So once every route to the listed picture is exhausted, a frame a quarter
of the way in becomes the card's picture -- past the black lead-in, and a
fair guess at what the video looks like. It goes through our own proxy, so
the canvas can be read back, is scaled to card width and JPEG'd to a
handful of KB, and is kept: later mounts and later sessions paint it
without a request, instead of asking again for a picture that is known to
be gone.
Only for favorites, once per item, one at a time, and never for a live
stream or a manifest. Two things worth knowing, both found with the
browser rather than reasoned about: a browser fires `seeked` for its own
initial seek to zero, so taking the frame on the first one captures the
opening of every video; and the same item is on screen in more than one
place, so the captures are deduped by a promise rather than the first
asker getting the picture and the rest being told there isn't one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MPZFnNdHbPGDTqQUNiE4ZN
