mpeg website?

tbobker

I want to create a website whrere by it loads up one massive page of images which are mpeg videos, each image is like a small windows media player and you can actually play the image and download it.

If i was to have loads of images on the page will it not take a really long time to load up the page if i have to many images on it?

scrupul0us

yea... thats not a real good idea...

thumbnail a cap from video and use that as your "image" and then when they click on it open another page to load the player and such

tbobker

Will most gallery systems support mpeg or what ever video format there is. If i store my video files in a directory, is it possible to write a script that can read the videos and automatically create thumbnails?

I have heard that it is a bad idea to keep images or video files in the database, just to store the path to the file. How is this achieved i have no idea other than somehow, a script can read the name of the image/video and stick it in the database somehow?

scrupul0us

i suggest going to www.hotscripts.com and seeing if there is something already made for this... or googling for scripts ideas since this has been done before... see what you come up with and come back 🙂

tbobker

There is not much in the way of video gallery systems, although i realise that a link to the video will work, but it is creating thumbs of the videos and putting links around them.

Possibly a script that will read the directory of all the videos and get the names and extensions of all the videos and could put them in the database then i could echo $row[videos] in the link like this;

my problem is how to go about doing it. How do you create a thumb from a mpeg unless you actually manually do it yourself, and if you have 100 mpegs that would take forever.

etully

tbobker,

 You're on the right track for displaying the list of videos from a database (or directory) and making dynamic links to the videos from the thumbnails.

I use a program called ffmpeg to do batch exports to GIF or JPG from a video.  It's really powerful.  For example, I can do things like say, "From these 3000 video files,  export a JPG of the  10th second,  the 30th second, and the 45th second from each video.  And crop the top 50 pixels off of each picture."  Unfortunately,  it took me about two days of coding and experimenting to get it working just the way I needed it to.   If you only have 100 videos,  you could probably do 100 manual screen captures in 3-4 hours so it doesn't make sense to spend a couple of days on getting it to work for you.  (Except that it's a good program to have around for these kinds of projects).

Eric

tbobker

I have around 100 videos but i want to constantly add more so i need to somehow have a script that will be constantly reading the video files and perhaps create new thumbes everytime the site is loaded, actually then maybe have it so that it creates thumbs by using random frames from each video then they would be different each time?

Thanks for the help.

etully

ffmpeg is a beautiful thing. It will do what you need but there is a steep learning curve. You can write a script that will grab a frame from every X seconds of the video and save them to JPG's. Then your PHP script that shows the thumbs could randomly pick which JPG (or JPGs) it wants to show. You could even write a script that makes animated GIF's from these exported frames. It will save you tons of time... once you have invested the time to learn and experiment with ffmpeg. Learning ffmpeg (and learning to write scripts that force it to do what you want) might be more time than it would take to do this manually. Of course, it's a cool tool to have under your belt.

scrupul0us

agreed... im willing to learn something new if it means i can click once todo what would take a million clicks (e.g learning excel macros/VBA) def look into ffmpeg