In this paper, we propose a new vector quantization method to create video thumbnail. In particular, we employ video time density function (VTDF) to explore the temporal characteristics of video data first. A VTDF-based temporal quantization is then applied to segment the whole video in time domain. The optimal number of segments is obtained by a temporal mean square error (TMSE)-based criterion. We employ independent component analysis (ICA) to each temporal segment for feature extraction and build a compact 2D feature space. An ICA mixture-based vector quantization method is developed to explore the spatial characteristics of video data. The optimal number of ICA mixture components is determined by Bayes information criterion (BIC). The video frames that are the nearest neighbors to the quantization codebook are sampled to generate the video thumbnails. Experimental results show that our method is computationally efficient and practically effective to create video thumbnails.