A video's preview and a picture's thumbnail are made inside the request that posts the message, and
nothing bounded how long either could take.
- The video preview filter also selects any frame from 5 seconds on. Rails' filter takes the second
frame it selects, which a video with a single keyframe and no scene change only gives at its end, so
ffmpeg decoded all of it.
- TimeLimitedVideoPreviewer gives ffmpeg 10 seconds of wall-clock time, kills it past that, and reports
a failed preview, so the message is posted without one.
- Pictures and videos above 250 megapixels, or whose size couldn't be read, get no preview: decoding
costs in proportion to the pixels, however small the file.
- The view shows a preview only if it was made when the message was posted. Its URL used to make it on
view, so a preview that failed or was skipped would be attempted again on every view. The cached
presentation's version goes up, so cached messages pick this up.
- A video's poster is made, when the message is posted, at the size the view shows it. The full-size WebP
made until now wasn't shown anywhere, and encoding it costs in proportion to the frame's pixels.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Bj8KnxpTf9sj2Ysa8aLAVa
Marcello Costagliola
Kevin McConnell