PHP Screen Grab a Video

[username]

Hi all,

I am researching how I may best take a screen grab of a video on another domain to my own...i.e. YouTube, similar to the way social networking sites such as digg do it. I want to be able to enter a URL, and have the code generate an image of the video part of the screen. I have seen this done, but am wondering whether there is some third party software which will handle this, or some great starting tips anyone has?

Thanks in advance.

[username]

So has anyone got any ideas on my post? Still searching for a reliable solution.

Thanks.

[janharders]

I don't think you can easily do it in php, you'd probably need a third party program that is able to decode the video and take a screencap. On the other hand, doesn't youtube (and probably most other video-services) provide screencaps you can link to?

[username]

Your right if there was a link to a usuable image resource on YouTube, that would be handy, but probably not ok without copyright permission. Also I looked through code.google.com for a solution, but nothing as yet? I noticed sites like Mixx.com, in their video section, they provide thumbnails for only YouTube videos indicating some method of achieving this at least for YouTube only?

Your help would be appreciated?

[jezra]

since youtube has access to the server, they probably have ffmpeg or another piece of video manipulation software installed that will allow youtube to extract and image from a frame of a movie.
Mixx.com is probably scraping the youtube page to get the already extracted image.