Forum Discussion
Stream thumbnails are very blurry
Why does Stream mess up the resolution of thumbnails? If I load a 1280px wide image and it's used on an embedded video that renders with a max-width of 1122px, the thumbnail should remain reasonably clear but it doesn't. The Stream web part which displays an even smaller version looks terrible too. Even hi-res stock images rather than screenshots look unacceptably bad. We'll be forced to use another video service if this can't be improved.
7 Replies
UPDATE: Just found this, so it's more clear what's actually going on.
Seems the thumbnails at present are limited to 1024 in each dimension. However, I just created a new PNG with dimensions of 853x480 and set that PNG as the thumbnail, then embedded the video in SharePoint again, and it's still blurry. Perhaps *slightly* less blurry, but still crappy. I think it's just a limitation they need to fix.
Begin original rant:
As far as I can tell, MS Stream just sucks at this (and many things).
I've working with embeds in SharePoint and have tried every combination of the embed ratios (dimensions) available in Streams and creating specific thumbnails those exact dimensions and it still is blurry.
Then I've tried taking screenshots of the embed size in the SharePoint site to count *those* exact pixels and built thumbnails around *those* dimensions. Still blurry.
The Stream platform feels like it's from 2005 with inane limits in nearly every aspect that a video hosting platform has.
As I work through building out SharePoint I see that the technical documentation is being published nearly daily these days (May-June-July 2020), so I feel like MS is franticly trying to flesh out their new "Microsoft" ecosystem (changed from their prior "Office" ecosystem) and there's just tons of stop-gap "solutions" in place. Everywhere I turn there are bugs and just plain wonky behavior. The best we can do is submit the findings to them and hope they get to them in due time.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-stream-ideas/idb-p/StreamIdeas
oiverson Interesting but you have to wonder how this functionality ever got released in its current state. Clearly it either wasn't tested or the Msft engineers involved have a visual problem.
mattchowell Nothing surprises me at this point in time!
My guess is that the initial feature was meant as a thumbnail for like, tiles or something rather than for a starter slide in a large dimension embed.
I also see my link was about their computer vision components, but I'm guessing the 1024 was used for multiple types of thumbnails. And for a true thumbnail, that would be fine. I think MS is just way ahead of themselves in getting products to market. "Release early and fix/add things later"
mattchowell I'm having the same issue with a very blurry thumbnail. Have you found a solution to this?
Nelsy_Rodriguez No, no response from Msft. I just got a notification of a reply from another user but Msft appears to have deleted that response, presumably because it was critical of Stream and the flawed O365 platform in general. Quoted here:
"As far as I can tell, MS Stream just sucks at this (and many things).
I've working with embeds in SharePoint and have tried every combination of the embed ratios (dimensions) available in Streams and creating specific thumbnails those exact dimensions and it still is blurry.
Then I've tried taking screenshots of the embed size in the SharePoint site to count *those* exact pixels and built thumbnails around *those* dimensions. Still blurry.
The Stream platform feels like it's from 2005 with inane limits in nearly every aspect that a video hosting platform has.
As I work through building out SharePoint I see that the technical documentation is being published nearly daily these days (May-June-July 2020), so I feel like MS is franticly trying to flesh out their new "Microsoft" ecosystem (changed from their prior "Office" ecosystem) and there's just tons of stop-gap "solutions" in place. Everywhere I turn there are bugs and just plain wonky behavior. The best we can do is submit the findings to them and hope they get to them in due time."
