Posted by Andy Jeffries on 08/15/06 12:48

On Sun, 13 Aug 2006 16:44:11 -0500, Karl Groves wrote:
> Does anyone out there know of a way to capture a frame (at random, if
> possible) of a movie file with PHP?

The easiest way will be to call out to mplayer to do it. You'll have to
do it twice, once to get the length of the movie (and then optionally a
second time if you don't want the first frame).

mplayer -identify -ss 20:00 -vo jpeg -ao null -frames 1 video.avi

This will print out (amongst many many other things):

ID_LENGTH=4498.26

This ID_LENGTH is the the length of the movie in seconds.

Calling mplayer like this will create a file called 000001.jpg which
you'll need to rename (and implement some locking PHP-side to ensure you
don't run two mplayer instances simultaneously which will whack the same
file).

So, along with exec($cmdline, &$output) you have all you need :-)

Cheers,


Andy


--
Andy Jeffries MBCS CITP ZCE | gPHPEdit Lead Developer
http://www.gphpedit.org | PHP editor for Gnome 2
http://www.andyjeffries.co.uk | Personal site and photos

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