About one year ago, I had to create animated GIFs as a preview of a video for a media portal. I recently stumbled upon the code I wrote and thought it was probably worth sharing. It makes a rather unconventional use of the SPL Iterators, proving how flexible they are.

His method combines Imagick, FFmpeg and a a Thumbnail_Extractor class that extends the SPL Iterator. The script runs through the frames of the movie file and allows you to define multiple places to pull thumbnails from. Complete code and output examples are included.

ffmpeg is such an amazing tool, looks like it's for video what ImageMagick is for images. An all-powerful all-formats wicked cool command-line tool. This blog post is an introduction to some of the MP3 capabilities of ffmpeg. I'll use ffmpeg to transform a blog post into a podcast-ready mp3 file.

The post shows how to use PHP's DOM functions to grab the title and contents of your post (a simple example, at least) and push that information out to a text file. From there, the "say" command is run on it with the "output" file parameter and the result is sent to ffmpeg for compression into an mp3.

So, as I've written in an earlier article on how to install FFMPEG on your server, while there are those who probably use a '�YouTube Clone'� script, there might be those who want to create their own using FFMPEG & PHP. FLV is the most widely used type of codec that runs on most Flash players.

The tutorial started with a diagram that outlines how the mini-app will work and is followed by the source. The script sets up the environment then grabs the file and sends it to the FFMPEG handler to be parsed and output as the FLV file (courtesy of a few handy command line parameters).