Is there an out the box tool I can use to do the following?

 

On my website I will have a section like a photo gallery, but for the short films I make.

 

I would like to display the thumbnails of each film (probably grab the first frame) and when a user clicks on the the thumbnail, the film plays.

 

I cant see anything, but I haven't been working with PHP for long. I would rather use something that is already out there instead of code it myself, but will if I have to.

 

Let me know if any of you PHP gurus know of anything or have made anything similar I can take a look at.

i haven't done anything like that myself but being a php developer the way i'd do it would involved an admin section with an upload feature, a mysql database back end and just a simple database driven front end.

 

I'll see if there's anybody done it already

Thanks for that Nick, but I can't see how a database will benefit me. Just get the PHP script to look in the directorys that hold the vids. If you can show me where the extra layer will benefit me, I will bow down to your greater knowledge.

 

This hopefully would only be a last resort though, as I am still looking for a solution I can buy out the box. It will save me a couple of weeks coding.

Couldn't you upload them to a youtube account/google video account and add the links by pasting them into a simple php database script then when you go to the page you click the thumbnail and the link refreshes the page with the correct video embedded into it?

 

step 1: upload a video to google

step 2: go to your admin section

step 3: fill in a title, a description, upload a thumbnail (rightclick and save the thumbnail of the google video), paste in the link they give you to embed the video on your page

step 4: submit it and it appears on your list of videos.

step 5: on the front end a list of thumbnails appears created by iterating through the database table, each having an id and the hyperlink reloads the page with a certain id variable (e.g. mygallery.php?id=2)

step 6: use $id = $_REQUEST['id']; to store the variable and the use it in a mysql query like SELECT * FROM tblGallery where id = '$id'

step 7: use the result to get the link and echo it through php back onto the page

or even simpler get the page to reference the url of your youtube/googlevideo gallery and output the page into a variable, tear out the crap, grab the thumbnails and the url links then the page will auto update each time your googlevideo/youtube page updates