how to make a thumbnail for youtube on windows movie maker

Scott Really? As the OP assumes, these images may initially originate from within a video file but, ultimately, they are stored as images somewhere. There must be an easier way of doing this? Some kind of 'video registry hack' perhaps? What's an NLE btw? I was hoping I could just replace (preferably) the beginning frame of the video with my own picture seems the most 'promising' (and im a bit familiar with using it) but that would mean I may have to re-encode everything which would take time and a lot of processing power (dunno if it'll work on m4vs) It just seemed random.i guess it was dependent on how the original video was encoded. Uhmmm.i do know the video thumbnails came from the video file itself.although, I don't really understand (like you said) which video frame at some point becomes the 'thumbnail' eventually. This does NOT include binary joining (even if on the surface, it looks like it works). When subsequently saving this, it will of course re-encode your video (which is a bad thing), unless you use proper lossless joining methods (e.g. The only way to get your pic to be used as the thumbnail is to figure out WHICH frame(s) is shown in the preview and use an NLE to insert a picture - AS VIDEO - into your existing video at that framecount point. It may store it in a separate cache file, but it is BASED on the contents of the video/movie file, so you can't 'replace' a thumbnail with something external to the video/movie. Thumbnails are meant to show you a low-rez preview poster of some point in a video/movie. I don't think you understand what a thumbnail is (comes from).

How to make a thumbnail for youtube on windows movie maker