I found a few ways to get thumbnails from swf using php. Today I was researching if I could make a game site of mine handle uploads as I use Mochi media games for this moment only.
The first one is complicated- php-ffmpeg is a PECL extension that allows getting frames from avi, flv, mpg. It can't work with swf. There's a project you can use to convert swf to avi in php, but it uses some python stuff I couldn't make work on my Ubuntu. Maybe someone will try this approach. Just search for "pyvnc2swf" on google.
Another aproach is to take a browser screenshot. This was a successful strategy for me. There are two possible projects I found. The problem is that they can't work on a normal hosting machine. For video manipulation this is not such a problem though. There'a a class in phpclasses that uses Mozilla to capture images. It needs X installed. I couldn't try it, because I can't install libxul on Ubuntu 10.04, but I used a similar approach with a Windows XP virtual machine.
So... The steps I used to succeed:
1. Make the virtual host visible to the main machine. I didn't have such connection. It was simple- create a host adapter for the VM.
2. Install WAMP. Another windows apache+php bundles may need extra installation of COM support. For the scripts to work you need to make some administrative tasks- go to control panel- administrative tools - services. Select apache and in the properties window in Log On check "Allow this service to interract with desktop.".
3. Get the capture class from http://www.phpclasses.org/package/4608-PHP-Take-screenshots-of-pages-with-Internet-Explorer.html .
4. Patch the screenshot.class.php file this way:
- add a public $sleep=0; variable for the class
- patch the navigate function this way:
public function navigate( $url = 'about:blank' )
{
$url = ( $url ) ? $url : 'about:blank';
$this->IE->Navigate( ($url) ? $url : 'about:blank' );
$this->url = $url;
$time = time();
if ($this->sleep){
set_time_limit(100);
sleep($this->sleep);
}
while ( $this->IE->ReadyState != '4' and $time + 2 > time() )
{
$this->pump();
}
if ( $this->pump )
{
$this->pump( 1000 );
}
return true;
}
The code for sleep is mine.
5. Write a simple script to fetch images:
require_once('screenshot.class.php');
class_exists('screenshot') or die('screenshot class does not exist.');
$screen = new screenshot(false, 768, 1024);
$screen->sleep= 30;
$screen->navigate('http://hot2.kefche.net/games/d67wtx.swf');
$screen->title('You can set custom titles too (and custom body if you want)');
$screen->position(0, 0);
$screen->screenshot();
$screen->output();
$screen->save('image.jpg');
$screen->quit();
unset($screen);
Why do we need sleep(30)? When a flash game is loaded it has some loading time, advertising. The screenshot script without sleep would get the loading bar most of the times.
So... We have a really slow thumbnail system. What we need is some extra stuff for a queue of the swfs and sending images to the main server. A cron called once every 2-3 minutes for a thumb will help too. Maybe an infinite process with no cron is possible on a machine that servers thumbnails only.
The attached image is generated by the script I described.
http://dreamer79.eu , http://dreamerwebdesign.blogspot.com (blog in bulgarian language)
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