FFmpeg
ffmpeg-php is an extension for PHP that adds an easy to use, object-oriented API for accessing and retrieving information from video and audio files. It has methods for returning frames from movie files as images that can be manipulated using PHP’s image functions.
This can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. FFmpeg is a command line tool that is composed of a collection of free and open source software libraries. It includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, and libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library.
This works well for automatically creating thumbnail images from movies. ffmpeg-php is also useful for reporting the duration and bitrate of audio files (mp3, wma…). ffmpeg-php can access many of the video formats supported by ffmpeg (mov, avi, mpg, wmv…)
