How does Bing video search get thumbnails and make previews of videos?

Question

And is it possible for me to do something similar without enormous amount of effort?

Background info: I have a large collection of urls from sites like youtube, metacafe etc. I would like to make a page with previews of all of the videos - at least an image of the video, preferably animated gif, or ideally the whole video like Bing does.

Answer 1

I would say it requires a lot of server power and a powerful compiled language such as C or C++ running on a server processing each video. I don't think there is an easy way to do this.