So, you want your website to upload videos, extract a thumbnail preview image, and then convert the video to FLV for later playback? And sure, there are some commercial packages available, and Adobe will soon be releasing their Flash Media Encoding Server. You want to do it with the open source ffmpeg and ffmpeg-php extension.

I had a client come to me this week with a quick request. His company distributes the same news to their website and their digital media network (they have plasma displays throughout their organization displaying a variety of content from Flash to video to images and text). So, he wants to use the same XML file for both.