Building a Video Thumbnail Generator Service with Go and FFmpeg at Scale
go
dev.to
A user lands on a discovery page and sees forty video cards. If thirty-nine of them show a crisp preview frame and one shows a gray box, the gray box is the one they don't click. On DailyWatch we index videos from a lot of sources, and not all of them ship a usable thumbnail. Some give us a 120x90 JPEG that looks like it was faxed. Some give us nothing at all. So we built a small service whose only job is to take a video URL or a keyframe and produce clean, consistently-sized thumbnails on deman