Hi ourasi, thank you very much for the help, that worked perfectly, i can now view all video thumbnails.
Just in case people don't have peppermint 5 or some equivalent distro installed, here is what i did.
Installed all the packages as ourasi pointed out, then booted up peppermint 5 from a usb flash drive.
Then, located the thumbnailers folder in usr/share/.
Then, copy and pasted script from text file into new text file with different name, into external drive, then wrote down exact titles of file names, etc.
Then, rebooted into wattos 8 debian.
Then, renamed folder and text files properly and pasted into usr/share/.
And it works great.
Before i tried this, i booted up the most recent official debian lxde desktop distro and it also is missing a thumbnailers folder and will not generate video thumbnails.

Oh also, you need to select, open folder in root, to paste the thumbnailers folder in usr/share/.

peace love light