Application Development Tips and Tricks > Snapshots and thumbnails

Snapshots and thumbnails

This section compares the techniques for grabbing single frames of video as pictures to use within your application. You can find the sample files for the code in the /flashcom_help/help_collateral/doc_snapshot and /doc_thumbnails directories under the installed Macromedia Flash MX authoring directories or in the server's installation directory. To see these applications in action, create directories named doc_snapshot and doc_thumbnails in your Flash Communication Server applications directory, and then open the corresponding SWF file.

These samples may seem to behave similarly when you run them, but in fact they work very differently. The doc_snapshot sample records only one frame, which it then displays. The doc_thumbnails sample records multiple frames (an entire stream), but displays only the first frame. You might use a snapshot application when you want to "take a picture" rather than record a stream, while you might use a thumbnail application when you want to let a user choose among multiple streams to play; you could display thumbnails for each of the streams that would give the user an idea of what was recorded on each stream.