Scene Explorer

If you frequently work with large numbers of video files, you probably know how difficult it is to find what you need without watching every single clip. Thankfully, there are various types of applications that can help you out.

Scene Explorer is one of them, a fairly simple utility that generates thumbnails for every video in a directory, making it easier for you to see their contents without actually playing them.

To begin with, you will need to select the folders you wish to manage. You can add multiple directories and then exclude any of them from the scan later on.

Scene Explorer uses FFmpeg and FFprove, which means it offers support for pretty much every video format out there. When generating thumbnails, the application can create either three or five images for each clip.

All the generated thumbnails will be displayed in the main window, and you can sort them by multiple parameters, such as name, file size, resolution, duration, bitrate and open count. What’s more, you have the option of only viewing thumbnails for files that are no longer on the disk.

Scene Explorer also gives users the possibility of assigning tags to each video. After tagging all of your clips, you can filter them much more easily.

At first glance, it is clear that the interface could use some work. While it features a fairly intuitive layout, it looks very outdated by modern standards.

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that you can switch to an alternative visual theme, as well as hide or show any of the four main panels.

Scene Explorer can prove to be very helpful in the right hands, as it makes it easier to browse through a large collection of videos. It isn’t too difficult to work with, but it could do with a UI upgrade.