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Does anyone know how to programmatically convert any media file to flv file?? and how to get a thumbnail of video clip(like when we upload a file to google video or youtube, they show a thumbnail of the video clip uploaded)??

Any ideas?????

I have finished creating a complete YouTube clone in .NET. The most complex part of the whole project was to find out how to convert media into FLV after upload. This research took the better part of my project time. Nonetheless, it is complete in terms of functionality, though UI needs some major rework.

Anyhow, what you need is FFMPEG.exe. It is a command line utility that you can run as a background process, or schedule a windows service to call it. FFMPEG requires command line parameters. Here are two examples of how you would convert using FFMPEG.exe.

ffmpeg.exe -i new5.wmv -f flv -vb 20000 -s 320*240 -aspect 4:3 -r 30 -sameq   Sample20.flv

ffmpeg.exe -i new5.wmv -f flv -ab 512 -ac 1 -ar 44100 Sample19.flv

To get thumbnail from video, use the following code to extract an image four seconds into the video:
ffmpeg  -itsoffset -4  -i demo2.flv -vcodec png -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 test.png

Download FFMPEG.exe (google for it) and thats it. Apart from this, the rest of youtube clone functionality is not complex and straightforward.

If you need more assistance, please let me know.

Regards,

Also, have a look at the youtube downloader web service that I have recently published. As you are probably aware, YouTube Google GData API allows replication of the entire YouTube functionality from within your application. However, the only piece missing from this API is the ability to download videos - which is understandable.

By using my web service, you can integrate youtube video downloading capability into your application. Here are the specs:

WSDL: http://www.ecubicle.net/youtubedownloader.asmx?WSDL

Service Test using POST:  http://www.ecubicle.net/youtubedownloader.asmx

Read more about it at my http://weblogs.com.pk/aspnet