Generate preview image from Video file?

Two ways come to mind:

• Using a command-line tool like the popular ffmpeg, however you will almost always need an own server (or a very nice server administrator / hosting company) to get that

• Using the "screenshoot" plugin for the LongTail Video player that allows the creation of manual screenshots that are then sent to a server-side script.

I recommend php-ffmpeg library.

Extracting image

You can extract a frame at any timecode using the FFMpeg\Media\Video::frame method.

This code returns a FFMpeg\Media\Frame instance corresponding to the second 42. You can pass any FFMpeg\Coordinate\TimeCode as argument, see dedicated documentation below for more information.

$frame = $video->frame(FFMpeg\Coordinate\TimeCode::fromSeconds(42));
$frame->save('image.jpg');

If you want to extract multiple images from the video, you can use the following filter:

$video
    ->filters()
    ->extractMultipleFrames(FFMpeg\Filters\Video\ExtractMultipleFramesFilter::FRAMERATE_EVERY_10SEC, '/path/to/destination/folder/')
    ->synchronize();

$video
    ->save(new FFMpeg\Format\Video\X264(), '/path/to/new/file');

By default, this will save the frames as jpg images.

You are able to override this using setFrameFileType to save the frames in another format:

$frameFileType = 'jpg'; // either 'jpg', 'jpeg' or 'png'
$filter = new ExtractMultipleFramesFilter($frameRate, $destinationFolder);
$filter->setFrameFileType($frameFileType);

$video->addFilter($filter);