Forum Discussion
Marc Mroz
Microsoft
MicrosoftRolling out - Custom thumbnails & title & description metadata
We started rollout of new capabilities to video and audio files stored in SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, and Teams allowing you to set a custom thumbnail for a video as well as set the title and description of the video. The description is rich text so you can add bold, italics, underline, bullets, and hyperlinks.
Currently as of June 2, 2022 these features are enabled to 50% of normal worldwide users.
To set a custom thumbnail...
- Play a video, open the side pane "Video settings"
- Under "Thumbnail" Upload an image or scrub to a time in the video and use that as the thumbnail
To set the title and description for a video...
- Play a video, open the side pane "About video"
- Set the title and/or description of the video (including rich text and hyperlinks)
- Click save
- Marc Mroz
Tasmania the custom thumbnail doesn’t get stored in a user visible place that you can access outside of the Stream thumbnail UI. Under the covers it’s stored in a special way that associates it with the video file itself, so that the thumbnail follows the permissions and life cycle of the video itself. So if you delete the video or move it the thumbnail is deleted or moved as well.
Why were you looking for it in a library?
- I'm wondering if I would need to create a ticket with support, but we're running into an issue where the Description on the video in SharePoint's library isn't translating into the Stream.aspx view of the video. When we try to set a description on the Stream view for the video (the stream.aspx page view of the video), it will give us an error "We weren't able to save your changes. Check your network connection and try again.".
Has anyone else run into this and found a solution to this?We are suddenly getting exactly the same error message "We weren't able to save your changes. Check your network connection and try again."☹️
Did you, or anyone reading this, find a fix?
- Marc Mroz
prabackar - When you say "Personal OneDrive" do you mean your OneDrive for Business or your personal/consumer OneDrive as part of M365 personal or Family licenses?
These features only work in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint in M365 enterprise/business.
If you are using OneDrive for Business and you don't see the "Video settings" side pane to set the thumbnail the only thing I can think of is that your video is a file extension, we don't recognize as a video file extension. If you are using OneDrive for Business, what's the file extension on the video?
- Marc MrozTitle should show up in various places. And description I believe can be added from classic library settings??
But we haven't put effort into making them show up in all the places. Do you have ideas on hat we should do and how you'd use it?- Hi Marc, thanks for your reply! You're right, Title shows up - apologies, I missed that somehow.
Description though seems to be a bit more elusive. I can get it to display is on the All Documents view as a column but then on the details pane the Description field is missing.
On a custom view, Description is selected as a displayed column, but in the Document Card Designer the column isn't available for selection. Again, missing in the details pane.
- Hello, hoping that someone will see this and be able to help. I am not able to upload to change the thumbnail images for videos that are on certain sites (the particular site is a communication site, but not sure if that is why). It says "This file was modified by another user. Try refreshing the page, then try again.". Nothing that I've tried makes it work. I was able to update the thumbnail for the same video located on a SharePoint team site.
- Marc MrozI've seen this bug before. Can you open a support ticket or work with your admin to do so?
If you can't then there is a way for you to directly just send us the feedback linked to your session via the ? Help button in the player.
I think this is an issue on our side we need to track down. Sorry!- Thank you, I will try to do that today. I did send feedback via the player yesterday.
- Marc MrozAs of June 2, 2022 this feature is deployed to 50% of worldwide users. (GCC coming soon).
- Marc MrozAs of May 9, 2022 custom thumbnails, title, and description are enabled in 100% of Targeted Release and 5% of worldwide. (Original post above updated)
- Nice! However, I spotted that there is no way for site owners to "edit" the videos which resides in the folder inside the Sharepoint site. I was able to edit video/audio settings only if they reside in my work OneDrive folder, but not on the Sharepoint site. Advice? We transferred the video files over to a location in Sharepoint and used File Viewer web parts to display the videos on the webpages.
- Marc MrozAre you saying you can't set video settings from the file viewer web part itself? I believe that is a known issue right now. If you open up the video from the document library itself or click the button on file viewer to open the video in a new window all the same video settings should be there.
File viewer is an embed and we can't yet make edits from an embed only when the video is playing in the full player page.- Hi,
Thanks for the reply. As a site owner, I was not able to edit the video settings of any clip residing in the document library as of yesterday. But now, it appears that the rollout is implementing. I double-checked and I was able to see video settings and its editing capabilities.
Thanks!
