Video thumbnail

Question

I am working on a site that people can submit the video's link. Then I just embed it. However, I want to get the thumbnail of the videos without saving the videos in my server. So that when I list the vidoes, I can use the thumbnails instead of embedding all videos.

My serve uses PHP. Assume the video is in SWF format.

is there anything in the or tag that I can 'grap' the thumbnail? or in PHP, is there anything that I can remotely get the thumbnail (or a frame ) of the remote video?

any idea?

Answer 1

You can use 'ffmpeg'. by using PHP to call it.

shell_exec  ("ffmpeg -i \"$FILENAME.flv\" -ss 00:00:04 -f image2 \"$FILENAME.jpg\"");

I am sorry to say that I've not test it so try it first.

EDIT: Just for fun, I make it a function. Here it is:

<?php
 
function GetThumbnailFileName($FileName, $ScreenShortSecond = 10) {
    $VDOLastModifiedDate = filemtime($FileName);
    $Thumbnail_FileName  = sprintf("%s-(%s::%02d).jpg", $FileName, $VDOLastModifiedDate, $ScreenShortSecond);
     
    if (!file_exists($Thumbnail_FileName)) {
        $FFMPEG_Command = sprintf(
            "ffmpeg -i \"%s\" -y -ss \"00:00:%02d\" -f image2 \"%s\" > /dev/null 2>&1",
            $FileName, 0 + $ScreenShortSecond, $Thumbnail_FileName
        );
        system($FFMPEG_Command);
    }
     
    if (!file_exists($Thumbnail_FileName))
        return null;
     
    return $Thumbnail_FileName;
}
 
$FileName  = "Test.flv";
$Thumbnail = GetThumbnailFileName($FileName);
if ($Thumbnail != null)
     echo "Thumbnail file is: \"$Thumbnail\"\n";
else echo "Fail creating a Thumbnail of \"$FileName\".";
 
?>

This function also cache the thumbnail and also ensure that the update thumbnail is recreated if the VDO is modified.

Enjoy