Is it possible to create a thumbnail image of a video in C# (like the first frame)?
Little update: I'll need a thumbnail image of an FLV video in C# since I'm using Flex to show video's. And yes, links to some libraries would be useful.
+3
A:
There are Open Source libraries you can use to do this. Check out OpenCVDotNet, a managed .NET wrapper for OpenCV, a "computer vision" library. Here's a link to a tutorial you may find useful.
Kevin Babcock
2009-11-04 15:04:41
My first impression is that it only supports avi... and I'll need flv's to be supported. But I'll have to check this to be sure.
Lieven Cardoen
2009-11-04 17:03:04
+3
A:
I can think of two options off the top of my head:
- Use an external tool, like ffmpeg, to generate thumbnails. This is probably the most commonly implemented solution to this problem.
- Parse the FLV file and only send the file only to the end of the first I Frame. (You can find the parsing logic in code that allows you to seek into the middle of an FLV by time mark.
Stu Thompson
2009-11-05 05:45:36
FFMPEG is the only solution I could find. There are some .NET libraries out there that provide a managed wrapper around FFMPEG, but I couldn't find any documentation on how to use them. I'm interested to hear what solution you come up with!
Kevin Babcock
2009-11-12 15:57:11
I just shell out to ffmpeg and parse the output. It works fine for me and is not as complex or hacky as it might sound. I've read about the C API to ffmpeg, but that seems like too much effort.
Stu Thompson
2009-11-12 16:50:52