Sorry for the late reply, I was on vacation.
Can you run this command from the command line? Replace the paths with the appropriate paths for your server /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i "/full/path/to/wp-content/plugins/video-embed-thumbnail-generator/images/sample-video-h264.mp4" -vframes 1 -f mjpeg "/full/path/to/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ffmpeg_exists_test.jpg"
Let me know what the result is.
Thank you for your response. The command you gave me produced an error about libfaac (see below). I reported it to the hosting company and they reinstalled ffmpeg and libfaac. It seems to be working well now. Thanks for the great plugin!
/usr/bin/ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libfaac.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Great news! FFMPEG is unbearably complex and you never know where an error is going to crop up.
I’m going to work on better error reporting at the finding FFMPEG stage in a future version to help people like you troubleshoot their installations. The current error doesn’t actually help anybody.
Thanks again for your help but it looks like I spoke too soon. I was able to make thumbnails which is great but I notice an error message when I try to encode alternate video formats.
Error: Unrecognized option 'b:a'
That’s because your hosting company installed a version of FFMPEG that’s a few years old. In the FFMPEG settings tab in the plugin settings page, turn on the Enable legacy FFMPEG "-b" and "-ba" bitrate flags. option.
Thanks again for your continued help. I enabled the legacy flags and am now getting an errors about the parse option. I tried them all and get the same message in the FFMPEG test output:
[NULL @ 0x89dc490]Unable to parse option value "baseline": undefined constant or missing (
Invalid value 'baseline' for option 'profile'
Have you tried setting the profile to “none”? Here’s a page linked to at the bottom of the FFMPEG settings page that I made to help people interpret the output from FFMPEG: https://github.com/kylegilman/video-embed-thumbnail-generator/wiki/Interpreting-FFMPEG-or-LIBAV-messages
Thanks Kyle. Profile “none” seems to be working.