Create thumbnail from video without ffmpeg in PHP - php

Question

I need to create thumbnail without ffmpeg because I have to deploy site on shared hosting and ffmpeg is not available on shared hosting.
Can someone suggest some solution?

Answer 1

If the video can be played back in the browser you could try using the Canvas feature of html5 to playback the video in a canvas and then post a still from that video to your server using javascript... Maybe you could even automate it, or if you only have a few dozen videos do it by hand...
The following is some jquery flavored javascript to upload a base64-encoded jpg in order to get you started. (Mashed up from several different projects, so untested and probably a security nightmare.)
<script>
var vidDOM = $('article').children('video');
var vid = vidDOM.get(2);
var canvas = document.getElementById('canvas');
var ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');
vidDOM.bind({
'paused':function () {
vid.width = canvas.width = vid.offsetWidth;
vid.height = canvas.height = vid.offsetHeight;
var $this = this;
ctx.drawImage($this, 0, 0, vid.width, vid.height);
uploadbase64();
}
})
function uploadbase64(){
canvasData = canvas.toDataURL("image/jpeg");
var ajax = new XMLHttpRequest();
ajax.open("POST",'ImageUpload.php?filename='+vidDOM.id,false);
ajax.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/upload');
ajax.send(canvasData);
}
</script>
And here is a bit of php to accept the upload.
<?php
$filename =$_GET['filename'];
if (file_get_contents('php://input')){
// Remove the headers (data:,) part.
$filteredData=substr(file_get_contents('php://input'), strpos(file_get_contents('php://input'), ",")+1);
// Need to decode before saving since the data we received is already base64 encoded
$decodedData=base64_decode($filteredData);
//create the file
if($fp = fopen( $filename, 'wb' )){
fwrite( $fp, $decodedData);
fclose( $fp );
} else {
echo "Could not create file.";
}
}
echo "Created image ".$filename;
?>