Use Text Instead of Embedded Image

[matthewnau]

Feature Outline:

Give the users the option to input a string of text as the focal-point of their rendered thumbnail rather than an embedded image. An input image could still be used as the default blurred background, but would instead have text in the foreground and no embedded image.

Why is this useful?

While thumbnails are useful for standalone videos, certain types of media such as Courses or Lectures do not have carefully-crafted thumbnails on every video. E-learning courses can easily contain hundreds of differing-length video lectures. With a high-volume of videos, it would be impractical for the creator to make a distinct thumbnail for each lecture. Therefore, we don't have to worry about losing any valuable content by replacing each video's cover with our own.

When managing hundreds of videos in a collection, it could be desirable to have them all adhere to the same visual-style. Except in this case, we could use something like each video's title and pass that in as the string to use in place of an embedded thumbnail. This would give the user an easy way to distinguish content that belongs together, but also differentiates each topic or lecture from one another.

Challenges:

• When using text in place of images, padding and font-size will have to be taken into account in order to make everything look perfect. We don't want to have text being cut-off or too squished. Therefore, additional image-validation will need to be implemented for this type of output.