Video thumbnail generation imagemagick?

Question

I have been searching for an alternative to ffmpeg (I'm on a host that doesn't allow ffmpeg or mencode due to server power or something) and I was looking into GD or Imagemagick (both of which are installed) is there a way to generate a video thumbnail from either of these two libraries or another one?

I also have the option of using ruby on rails or python or CGI/perl to do the generation. But I'm not skilled in either of those languages so I would need a tutorial or script already wrote.

Anyone help?

Answer 1

Imagemagicks Convert can do video tumbnails.

convert -quiet moviefile.mov[10] movieframe.gif

where the number between the [] is the framenumber of the movie that is converted

Answer 2

In fact, ImageMagick just uses ffmeg under the hood. If ffmpeg is not installed, you'll have no luck using ImageMagick

Answer 3

As tijej said you must need ffmpeg in order to use ImageMagick. If you are OK with that you can also use FFmpeg::Thumbnail module.

Sample:

my $baz = FFmpeg::Thumbnail->new( { video => '/my/video/file.flv' } );
$baz->output_width( 640 );
$baz->output_height( 480 );
$baz->offset( 21 );
$baz->create_thumbnail( undef, '/my/first/thumbnail.png');