get thumbnail of divx/avi and mkv video (ASP.net)

Question

When the user uploads a video (only divx/avi/mkv allowed) I'd like to get a thumbnail for the video so that is can be displayed in the divx player before play is clicked. Is there any way to do this is ASP.net or javascript.

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this would be to use something like FFMpeg, though it's a command line application and you'd probably need to write some kind of wrapper around it. For more information on the exact parameters you might need to use, check out Creating video thumbnails using ffmpeg.

There are some other options, such as Flash Video MX SDK, but they tend to be COM solutions rather than managed code and are generally quite clunky to implement. They can also be quite expensive, which may make them unfeasible.

Answer 2

You can use ffmpeg to create your thumbnails.

Checkout this blog post : link

In .net you can create Process and pass arguments to execute the tool from your code.