Video Preview Thumbnails in Digikam

For a long time I thought Digikam did not support video thumbnail previews because I never got those on my system (Kubuntu). Of course this was all my fault for being too lazy to check first. A simple scrap over the Digikam's FAQ showed me:

Why don't I have thumbnails for my video files?
Why thumbnail generation stops at the first video file I have ?


First, check if it's the same in konqueror.

Digikam uses KDE to generate thumbnails and KDE rely on aRts to do that.
So, you should check your aRts configuration. ARts can use xine plugin for video files, so try if xine is able to play your video files. You may have to use additional codecs (eg libxine-extracodecs on debian/ubuntu if you already have libarts1-xine) for that.
Try also to play your video files using xine (if libarts1-xine is installed).

Remember that if it doesn't work in konqueror, it won't work in digikam...

Indeed opening the photos folder in Konqueror did not show any video thumbnails leading me to think this is not a missing feature but a missing configuration or library.

Reading carefully the FAQ entry above it hints about libarts1-xine being installed so I quickly entered the following command:

sudo aptitude install libarts1-xine

And in less than a minute I had video thumbnail previews of all my video clips on Digikam and in Konqueror too.