Creating Thumbnails From Ffmpeg Hangs Php

[piyusharora420]

Hello,

 

I have been working on a php webservice, which receives videos(uploaded) from iphone and upload them to Amazon cloudFront. After uploading videos, I need to generate thumbnails for video from the Amazon link generated. I am using ffmpeg with shell_exec command for it. Here is the code for the same:

 

public function createThumbnail($userId,$fileUrl,$imageName){
       //$imageUrl = 'http://184.168.116.177:81/json_api/json/bin/';
       if(!is_dir("images/".$userId)){
           mkdir("images/".$userId);
       }
       // path of installed ffmpeg
       $ffmpeg = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] .'bin/ffmpeg';
       $cmd = "$ffmpeg  -itsoffset -1 -i $fileUrl -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 images/".$userId."/".$imageName;

       shell_exec($cmd);

       return "images/".$userId."/".$imageName;
   }

 

The above code generates the thumbnail, but script does not execute after shell_exec command. So, there is no response sent to iphone end about the thumbnail link. This function works well video is uploaded from web browser of pc. If I comment, shell_exec command, then response is sent to iphone end, but obviousely image is not created.

 

Thanks in advance.

[Christian F.]

My guess would be that the thumbnail generation takes too long, and causes the PHP script to time out. Try running it as a background process, and have it update the database once it's done with the parsing.

In the meantime you can have a placeholder image, telling the user that the video is being processed.

[piyusharora420]

Thanks for your instant response. could you please explain how I can do this in background? Please explain with example code if possible.

[Christian F.]

Lots of examples.