Create thumbnail from video without ffmpeg in PHP

Question

I need to create thumbnail without ffmpeg because I have to deploy site on shared hosting and ffmpeg is not available on shared hosting.

Can someone suggest some solution?

Answer 1

If the video can be played back in the browser you could try using the Canvas feature of html5 to playback the video in a canvas and then post a still from that video to your server using javascript... Maybe you could even automate it, or if you only have a few dozen videos do it by hand...

The following is some jquery flavored javascript to upload a base64-encoded jpg in order to get you started. (Mashed up from several different projects, so untested and probably a security nightmare.)

<script>
    var vidDOM = $('article').children('video');
    var vid = vidDOM.get(2);
    var canvas = document.getElementById('canvas');
    var ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');

    vidDOM.bind({
        'paused':function () {
            vid.width = canvas.width = vid.offsetWidth;
            vid.height = canvas.height = vid.offsetHeight;
            var $this = this; 
            ctx.drawImage($this, 0, 0, vid.width, vid.height);
            uploadbase64();
        }
    })

    function uploadbase64(){
        canvasData = canvas.toDataURL("image/jpeg"); 
        var ajax = new XMLHttpRequest();
        ajax.open("POST",'ImageUpload.php?filename='+vidDOM.id,false);
        ajax.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/upload');
        ajax.send(canvasData);
    }
</script>

And here is a bit of php to accept the upload.

<?php
    $filename =$_GET['filename'];

    if (file_get_contents('php://input')){
        // Remove the headers (data:,) part.
        $filteredData=substr(file_get_contents('php://input'), strpos(file_get_contents('php://input'), ",")+1);

        // Need to decode before saving since the data we received is already base64 encoded
        $decodedData=base64_decode($filteredData);

        //create the file
        if($fp = fopen( $filename, 'wb' )){
            fwrite( $fp, $decodedData);
            fclose( $fp );
        } else {
            echo "Could not create file.";
        }
}

echo "Created image ".$filename;

?>