Symphony.

I’ve got a project where i have to show the thumbnail of a flv video on the initial page and on article page video itself. Have no idea how to make it without forcing the client to download thumbnail manually. May be someone has already run into such case. Apreciate any help!

Hi ibcico,

This can be achieved fairly easily with ffmpeg. The system allows you to create thumbnails from video at any given timestamp, which means that you could create an interface to allow your producers to select the position within the video which they want the thumbnail to be created from. If this is too complex, you could simply take the screenshot from an arbitrary fixed point.

This command will generate a 320*240 jpeg from the input movie:

ffmpeg  -itsoffset -4  -i input-move.flv -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 output.jpg

Ok, but may be you can give any hints how it can be acheived within Symphony. So that on showing video index page thumbs could be generated automatically.

I don’t have any idea at the moment.

It’s a complex problem, best done with a custom field (extension). It can’t really be done natively. Your extension would:

• provide an upload field that accepted only video types (AVI, MOV etc)
• when an entry is created, execute the above command to asynchronously encode the video
• when the field outputs its XML in a Data Source, make it look for the JPEG and if it’s found, write the path to the JPEG into the XML. If not found, the video has not yet been encoded