Question

I always wondered if it was possible to parse the thumbs db files located in Windows 7 in:

C:\Users\%userdata%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer

In Windows XP they used to be located in each folder, but I assume I would have to traverse these to find the directory I want, etc. I’m aware there are ways to generate thumbnails using ffmpeg and such, but want to find a way in PHP to parse that db file since Windows has already generated thumbs for me. It’s not in plain text (which I was hoping for).

Answer 1

I gave up trying to do parse these out and instead used ffmpeg to generate thumbs like this. The system call takes the 10th frame of the all the mp4 videos in my recordings folder and saves it as a 320×240 image and as the filename.jpg. I had a bunch of videos so I had to increase the max execution time of PHP to handle it.

foreach (glob("F:\\Recordings\\*.mp4") as $filename) {
    $path = pathinfo($filename);
    system("c:\\ffmpeg\\bin\\ffmpeg.exe -itsoffset -10 -i \"$filename\" -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -an -f rawvideo -s 320x240 \"".$path['filename'].".jpg\"");
}