ThumbnailPreviewing

What Is It?

Thumbnail Preview is one of many Shareaza Features. It allows you to view a thumbnail - or a screenshot/screencap - of a video file within search results. This is useful because often you download a video file and find out it's not what you wanted. Whether it be a totally different file (mislabeled/named) or something or even completely blank.

How do you use it?

When you search for something, click the "Details" button on the search toolbar. Then you should see a box on the far left of the details panel, if a preview is avaliable there should be a "Click to Preview" link. Click that link and it then downloads the cached preview image from the other user and shows it to you. The image is then cached on your computer until your session ends. So you can continue to browse and preview more files in your search results.

NOTE: The quality of the thumbnail preview is degraded so that the file size isn't too high (that it doesn't create overhead for users). So just because the preview image may not look very good, the actual file quality may be better. If you want to evaluate the file further, just start to download it and use the Preview feature to preview the file and see it's quality.

Tweaks, Tips & Tricks

You can go to the "Advanced Settings" in Shareaza and set a few different settings which effect thumbnail previewing. UploadsPreviewQuality, for example, is the quality of the thumbnails you want to generate. It's ussually set around 75%. You can set it to 100% for the highest quality avaliable. It's ussually set lower than that to preserve overhead bandwidth. Within the Shareaza Settings, you can disable "Create Dynamic Previews". Disabling this will disable the ability to create previews on demand. For example, if enabled and someone requests a preview of a file you have, you will generate the thumbnail then send it to them. If disabled, you will not generate the thumbnail.