I'm considering adding a system to my existing website that thumbnails SWFs. However, the only way that appears to be viable is to start up a browser from the application server and take a picture of the SWF while it runs. My server is headless (I.E. it barely has the ability to run a desktop, and I turned that off to save resources), so that isn't a possibility.

I've looked at Ming, but that only creates swfs. ffmpeg-php is a possibility, but it only handles embedded FLVs. I'm running out of options.

How does SWFchan make snapshots of their flash movies?

Hehe, just kidding. I'm actually using a very old dll file that I got licensed to me years ago to use on a old version of worldspace.nu (one of my other sites). In those days I had the first flash site online that actually automated the screenshots, of course that was just from my own observations (I couldn't find any other swf site that had screenshots that the users/admin didn't have to take and upload manually).

I can't recall where I got it from however, 5-7 years ago I got it... But it was for free, one only had to contact them to get his personal license a day later. Should turn up as a result if you search around a few minutes I suppose, these days there should be lots of alternatives. The dll solution I have isn't perfect as can be seen from many blank screenshots around the site, I've been meaning to program my own screen-shotting solution but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Unfortunately it suffers the same limitation as swfchan: if a movie is pure actionscript this method won't work because these movies typically have only 1 or 2 frames, neither of which have any usable data that can be converted into BitmapData.

Another option, if the above fails, is to take the swf, play it for x amount of seconds, then take a screenshot. This should help for the many cases where depending on framecount won't work.

The solution I have in my head involves your last line. Was thinking of letting the flash file actually startup in memory and then seek to various places for the screenshots without unloading it, which will produce better results than jumping directly to a frame in the time line, take a screen, quit, and repeat. It should be fail-safe except maybe for a few rare ActionScript frames that could get stuck in an endless loop, but then it's just a matter to take another frame or fallback on the old dll.