How to create thumbnails from SWF games?

Hello friends,

I've been spending almost a week now in finding the right software to create thumbnails from SWF games. There are some good ones, but I want one that's automatic and really works for every SWF game out there.

I would like to select all my SWF files, choose the height and width of the output image and hit the button and wait. Is there anything like that? Please let me know (yes commercial products are just fine, but of course I would like a free solution)

The best solution will be web based where the script can automatically create a thumbnail.

I wonder, all these guys with a game site out there, where do you get your thumbs from? Yes you can buy gamepacks including thumbs, but when you want to have your own size to differ from the crowd, how do you create them? I hope not in Photoshop, one by one..


Thanks for your reply

 

I don't know for swf games if it's possible, but there's a software that creates automatic thumbs out of images. (Don't remember the name though).
WHat you could probably do is search for that software, and then just take a screenshot of every game, and use it to create the thumbs.

 

Yes that's true, there are many tools to create thumbs for an image, heck you can even make a photoshop resize action and run is as a batch. But I'm really looking for a tool that can create thumbs from SWF's.. It takes a lot time to make printscreen 2700 games and make a thumb for each of them...

 

how did you get so many SWF's anyway? wow.

I am not aware of anything greater than a screengrab myself, so I seriously hope there's a better tool out there for you

beat of luck, innovati!

 

I bought a gamepack with all these games. You can find great deals in the Buy, Sell or Trade section here on DP

 

I'm a little lost in what you want. Do you want it where the thumbs are on one page and you click the thumb and then it open up the game which is on another page?

The reason I'm asking is, it can be done but you need the FLA file that made the SWF to do it.

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=generate+thumbnails+swf&btnG=Search&meta=

May find something interesting...

 

You might wanna just do them manually, I know it';s a lot of work, but you're gonna wanna open them all up to make sure they all work anyway, and I mean, you're not just gonna put them all up online because you have them, you're only gonna put the good ones up anyway, so after opening a bnch you may not even need to take a shot of them anyway!

 

Just use my API which creates thumbnails for flash videos which is the same as an embedded swf.

http://blog.myvidster.com/search/label/API

 

I found a few ways to get thumbnails from swf using php. Today I was researching if I could make a game site of mine handle uploads as I use Mochi media games for this moment only.
The first one is complicated- php-ffmpeg is a PECL extension that allows getting frames from avi, flv, mpg. It can't work with swf. There's a project you can use to convert swf to avi in php, but it uses some python stuff I couldn't make work on my Ubuntu. Maybe someone will try this approach. Just search for "pyvnc2swf" on google.
Another aproach is to take a browser screenshot. This was a successful strategy for me. There are two possible projects I found. The problem is that they can't work on a normal hosting machine. For video manipulation this is not such a problem though. There'a a class in phpclasses that uses Mozilla to capture images. It needs X installed. I couldn't try it, because I can't install libxul on Ubuntu 10.04, but I used a similar approach with a Windows XP virtual machine.
So... The steps I used to succeed:
1. Make the virtual host visible to the main machine. I didn't have such connection. It was simple- create a host adapter for the VM.
2. Install WAMP. Another windows apache+php bundles may need extra installation of COM support. For the scripts to work you need to make some administrative tasks- go to control panel- administrative tools - services. Select apache and in the properties window in Log On check "Allow this service to interract with desktop.".
3. Get the capture class from http://www.phpclasses.org/package/4608-PHP-Take-screenshots-of-pages-with-Internet-Explorer.html .
4. Patch the screenshot.class.php file this way:
- add a public $sleep=0; variable for the class
- patch the navigate function this way:
public function navigate( $url = 'about:blank' )
{
$url = ( $url ) ? $url : 'about:blank';
$this->IE->Navigate( ($url) ? $url : 'about:blank' );
$this->url = $url;
$time = time();

if ($this->sleep){
set_time_limit(100);
sleep($this->sleep);
}
while ( $this->IE->ReadyState != '4' and $time + 2 > time() )
{
$this->pump();
}
if ( $this->pump )
{
$this->pump( 1000 );
}
return true;
}
The code for sleep is mine.
5. Write a simple script to fetch images:
require_once('screenshot.class.php');

class_exists('screenshot') or die('screenshot class does not exist.');

$screen = new screenshot(false, 768, 1024);
$screen->sleep= 30;
$screen->navigate('http://hot2.kefche.net/games/d67wtx.swf');
$screen->title('You can set custom titles too (and custom body if you want)');
$screen->position(0, 0);
$screen->screenshot();
$screen->output();
$screen->save('image.jpg');
$screen->quit();

unset($screen);

Why do we need sleep(30)? When a flash game is loaded it has some loading time, advertising. The screenshot script without sleep would get the loading bar most of the times.
So... We have a really slow thumbnail system. What we need is some extra stuff for a queue of the swfs and sending images to the main server. A cron called once every 2-3 minutes for a thumb will help too. Maybe an infinite process with no cron is possible on a machine that servers thumbnails only.

http://dreamer79.eu , http://dreamerwebdesign.blogspot.com (blog in bulgarian language)

 

taking a screenshot is the easiest way to do this

 

Yep, I described taking a screenshot with a little delay to skip ads and loading screen and automation.
The idea of the first post is simple- in google you find only pages saying "This is impossible. Try making screenshots on your own and edit them in photoshop.". I wanted to say "On a site with a collection of over 10000 games you may try this very ugly, but automated way.".