Hi Mike,

The best thing to do, assuming you have the appropriate account privileges, to improve the resolution of the thumbnail images is to adjust their size by editing the ingest profiles that are used for your uploaded videos.

https://studio.support.brightcove.com/media/general/increasing-quality-poster-and-thumbnail-images.html#ingest

Once the thumbnail sizes have been addressed on the ingest profiles the Jupiter team uses, it’s a matter of re-uploading the thumbnails in the Media Module or re-transcoding the videos in question.

Hello ​@Mike Al-Alawi, 

Thank you for you for sharing your questions on Bright Spot!

​@Justin van Emmerik I want to thank to follow-up this question and sharing the solution.

I would like to complement Mike's answer, our media module allows you to update the thumbnail image for your video easily. You can either upload a new image file or use the "capture" button to create a new thumbnail.

For reference, please take a look at the provided screenshots, which demonstrate the process for each option.

Additionally, you can review the following public documentation for further details:
Brightcove Documentation: Uploading Poster and Thumbnail Images (https://studio.support.brightcove.com/media/properties/uploading-poster-and-thumbnail-images.html#:~:text=Steps-,to,-upload%20new%20images)

Please feel free to reach out if you need any further assistance!

Hi ​@Justin van Emmerik , 

I have a similar problem.

Vertical videos are a small but significant part of our content and we want to be able to select a frame for the thumbnails and then have it display well in a side carousel with the player. At the moment these thumbs are very blurry as the OP describes.

See here 

I’ve created a custom encoding profile for these videos with images that suit 9:16 display. But this only works for the auto generated thumbs that are taken from the mid-point of the video. Selecting a frame in the Media Module doesn’t honor the encoding profile used for the video. It uses the dimensions specified in the “default” profile. 
We don’t want to change the default profile as the majority of our content is still 16:9.
We could add extra images to the default profile but then we would have to manually change them in the playlist for every video which is a very cumbersome workflow and prone to human error.
Given the prevalence of vertical video this seems like something that you may have a solution for or have something in the roadmap?
Is there anything that you know of that could help this workflow?

Dave McMillan 

Hi ​@David McMillan have you attempted to re-transcode the video with the intended ingest profile to see if that addresses the thumbnail image quality? I’m not sure why the default ingest profile would be referenced at all. The encoding system should associate the specified 270 x 480px as defined in the ingest profile you have created to support the portrait aspect ratios.

Also, double check at the time of upload that the intended ingest profile is available to the user and is selected to process the video against.

Hi ​@Justin van Emmerik ,  yes, the encoding profile is available to users.
When you re-transcode, the thumbs are made to the correct size, but revert to taking a frame from the mid-point of the video. When I then chose the frame I want for the thumb, they are created using the default encoding profile settings again. Uplaoding an image will also be re-sized to the default profile settings.

Dave Mc

​@David McMillan could you please raise a ticket with Brightcove Support to have this investigated.

Cheers ​@Justin van Emmerik . I already had (Brightcove Case 01550321) and basically there wasn’t a workable solution. I’m not sure how to escalate or make this a feature request? Or do you know if this is already on the roadmap?

Hi ​@David McMillan 

Is it possible to associate the final/approved images at the time of video upload? Video Cloud will apply the correct resolution to the images if you associate them with the video at upload time in the Upload Module.

If that is not a viable, I can see in the case thread the support engineer has provided some guidance on using the Dynamic Ingest API to inject the desired image against the video where the image is remotely hosted. If this isn’t a workable solution from a dev standpoint Brightcove Services may be able to assist in building out a workflow that does this for you.

Alternatively, you could augment the default ingest profile to have larger (higher resolution) thumbnails but maintain the same aspect ratio which would avoid disrupting the primary workflows you have.

This would involve changing the default ingest profile from having a thumbnail of 160 x 90 to something like 320 x 180 or something that is divisible by 8 (384 x 216 or 512 x 288). Without getting too large of course.

Hope one of these options works for you.