Create JPEG Thumbnails

A more bandwidth-conscious way of displaying thumbnails is to create scaled-down JPEG files for each video file. You have several options for creating them; you can:

• Export a single scaled-down frame in a video editing program.
• Take a screenshot and scale it down in an image editing program.
• Use a third-party utility such as Camtasia to capture and export a single frame.

The optimal size for thumbnails in this example is 60 pixels high by 80 pixels wide, 72 dpi resolution. Place the scaled-down JPEG files in the same directory as your SWF file, in a directory called thumbs. When you have your thumbnail files, you’ll need to tell your application where to find them, which brings me to the XML file that is part of the ZIP file that accompanies this tutorial.