mediapreview

Generate compact AVIF preview images from images, videos, PDFs and office documents.

mediapreview is a small library of low-level converters. Give it a file path and it returns AVIF bytes plus a response object telling you which backend handled it and whether it succeeded.

Install

uv add mediapreview[standard]

[standard] pulls in every backend and the optional worker pool. Use the feature-specific extras to avoid dependencies not needed for your application.

Quick start

from pathlib import Path
from mediapreview import dispatch

avif_bytes, resp = dispatch(
    Path("photo.jpg"),
    quality=60,
    maxsize=512,
    maxzoom=2.0,
)

if resp.ok:
    Path("preview.avif").write_bytes(avif_bytes)
else:
    print(resp.error)

dispatch picks the backend from the file extension or mimetype. You can also call the backend functions directly:

from mediapreview import process_image, process_pdf, process_video

avif, resp = process_image(Path("photo.jpg"), maxsize=512, quality=60)
avif, resp = process_pdf(Path("doc.pdf"), maxsize=512, quality=60, page_number=0)
avif, resp = process_video(Path("clip.mp4"), maxsize=512, quality=60)

Worker pool (optional)

Heavy native dependencies and crashes stay out of your async loop by running previews in a pool of persistent subprocess workers.

from mediapreview.pool import (
    start_preview_workers,
    shutdown_preview_workers,
    run_preview,
)

await start_preview_workers()
try:
    avif, resp = await run_preview(Path("doc.pdf"))
finally:
    await shutdown_preview_workers()

Add the worker extra to use the pool.

CLI

mediapreview photo.jpg -o preview.avif
mediapreview doc.pdf -q 70 --maxsize 1024
mediapreview oosetup    # build + run the bundled OnlyOffice container

OnlyOffice setup

Office previews need an OnlyOffice Document Server. A patched Docker image ships inside the package and can be started with:

mediapreview oosetup [name] [port]

oosetup logs to stderr and prints one line on stdout:

ONLYOFFICE_JWT_SECRET=<token>

Set ONLYOFFICE_JWT_SECRET yourself to reuse an existing secret; otherwise a random one is generated.