We present a new method for generating thumbnail images from H.264/AVC coded bit streams. What distinguishes our approach from previous works is that it determines the thumbnail image pixels by summing the residual and estimate block averages. The residual block averages are directly acquired in the transform domain and the estimated block averages are calculated in the spatial domain. Due to the construction of the reference pixels in the spatial domain, the proposed method eliminates the source of mismatch error, thus the result does not suffer any degradation. The thumbnail images produced by the proposed method are indistinguishable to the ones by the method that decodes the H.264/AVC intra coded bit streams and then scales them down. For most images, the proposed method also executes almost 3 times faster than the down-scaling method at frequently used bandwidths.