Grab image from Flash?

[lionbarrage]

Hi all,

I was just wondering if anyone knows how to grab an image from a flv
or a swf when a user uploads a file?

Any help would be appreciated!

[Hans-Werner Hilse]

Re: Grab image from Flash?

Hi,

On Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:45:56 -0700 (PDT)
lionbarrage <cmakalinaw@gma il.comwrote:

I was just wondering if anyone knows how to grab an image from a flv
or a swf when a user uploads a file?

For FLV:
ffmpeg (or FWIW, mencoder or mplayer). Not PHP-specific, you'd have to
call external binaries.

For SWF:
Errrrrr.... Dunno. Maybe gnash or swfdec are possibilities, but I claim
lack of experience (and personal interest) here.

-hwh

[cwdjrxyz]

Re: Grab image from Flash?

On Aug 27, 7:45 pm, lionbarrage <cmakali...@gma il.comwrote:

Hi all,
>
I was just wondering if anyone knows how to grab an image from a flv
or a swf when a user uploads a file?

This is not very closely connected to php usually, although I
sometimes use php with a form to select from various formats,
sometimes including flash, to play or download only what is needed for
a specific format once the desired format is selected.

Modern flash video is flv/swf. When you encode it, you get 2 files.
The flv(flash video) file contains the video information and is large
and can have very high resolution, if desired. The swf is a container
file which contains the player that can be constructed in many ways
with controls, logos, text etc. Both the flv and swf files must be on
the server, but only the swf is used in the source code for the page.
When a video is called using the swf file, it has an internal
connection to the flv file and starts it downloading to the temporary
cache of the browser. If the download speed is greater than required
to keep up with the needed playing speed, the video starts streaming
nearly at once. A flv was never designed to be used without the swf
file. The flv can often be recovered from the browser temporary cache.
The Real 11 player often will do so, and there have been plugins for
Firefox that will do so. There are also many commercial programs to do
so. It also can be done by hand, but this can be a bit tricky on some
browsers. The .swf file usually is not captured, and even if you did
you likely would not want the logos, text, ads, and links back to the
owner's server that it often contains. Thus stand alone players for
playing the flv without the swf container file have come on the
market, and some convert the flv to some other format rather than use
a special flv player. In older flash, all including the video was
contained in a single swf file. This often left much to be desired, so
for high resolution flsh movies, the newer flv/swf method now is
mainly used by major news sites, YouTube, MySpace, and many others
when high quality video is desired.