Is it possible to generate thumbnail from a flv using as3?

Question

Is it possible to generate multiple thumbnails from a FLV using only as3? The flv is on the same server as the swf so I'm not using any dedicated streaming server. I'd imagine that as long as the flv has load the video you'd be able to pull bitmapdata from a specific time of the flv.

My idea is to pull around 8 images from every flv, convert them to buttons and use them as links to specific chapters in the flv.

If this is not possible, would it work better with a dedicated streaming server like red5?

Edit:

• I'd also like to know how to do it if it's possible :)
• The idea is to not use the server.
• The thumbnails will only be used within the swif, so no saving to another location.

Answer 1

I know it is possible to get mplayer to output stills from an FLV (though might need a bit of fiddling to get the time reference right), and these in turn can be stuffed into ImageMagick to resize into thumbnails. Not best solution, but probably easier than digging around as3's API.

Answer 2

You can do this in AS3 as long as you're actually playing the video within Flash. While playing when you seek to the desired frame capture a bitmap. If you want to save the bitmap for later use you need server-side code to store it.

Streaming vs http download will not make this problem any easier or harder (although with a streaming server you can seek to the desired point without having to download the whole flv to that point).

This would be much better done on the server. You'll need an app that can extract an image from an FLV. ffmpeg can do it.