I wanted to see thumbnails for videos in Thunar. I’ve got Thunar 1.6.3, compiled from source from Slackware current some time ago. SlackBuilds.org has a package for the project thunar-thumbnailers, but for video it depends on ffmpegthumbnailer.
The README says uncomment the line --enable-ffmpeg in the SlackBuild script, but if you only do that you get: --enable-ffmpeg: command not found. Turns out, an earlier line was missing its trailing backslash.
O wait, first I got the error configure: error: Install tetex before enabling latex thumbnailing. That was caused by me simply using su to be root, instead of su - (the second way forces root to really log in, and that has an effect on the content of the $PATH variable, which was missing tetex).
Subsequently I deleted the content of ~/.thumbnails/normal. At this point I should probably have restarted not only Thunar but also tumbler, but I got distracted by the advice in the README to:
execute the following command: /usr/libexec/thunar-vfs-update-thumbnailers-cache-1
That was not on my system however (Slackware 14). Also, I didn’t have /usr/lib/thunar-thumbnailers (probably confusion from Ubuntu configurations). In any case, for good order, I upgraded Thunar and tumbler from Slackware current, but that didn’t change anything. Maybe just restarting tumbler might have worked, instead I rebooted the entire system. Opened Thunar and yes, thumbnails for videos!
Pages that helped me:
403 Forbidden error.
