<p>I'm looking for a simple way to grab thumbnails of FLVs in ASP.NET, without having to change any permissions/settings on the server. Ideally, nothing is installed on the server machine, but if necessary, small tools such as FFmpeg are fine.</p>

<p>I've tried FFmpeg using the command-line tool with Process.Start, but the same command that works in a Windows Forms application and from the command prompt does not work in ASP.NET (presumably because of permissions). </p>

<p>I've also tried using TAO.FFmpeg, and it seems to be working most of the time, but fails randomly, and does not start working again until the machine is restarted. Even when I use the sample code (decoder.cs), it sometimes fails when I try to open multiple videos in a single request.</p>

<p>If this isn't possible in a clean/straightforward way, I'm open to other suggestions.</p>

If you can embed Flash on a page, the easiest way to show a thumbnail of a FLV is to put a video object on the stage, attach a video to it through a NetStream in actionscript, and then put in an event handler to pause the move immediately after it starts playing.
For example, if you have a video object on the stage called "myVideo", and you're trying to show a thumbnail of "someVideo.flv", try this actionscript (2.0) code,
```
var connection_nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
connection_nc.connect(null);
var stream_ns:NetStream = new NetStream(connection_nc);
myVideo.attachVideo(stream_ns);
stream_ns.play("someVideo.flv");
stream_ns.seek(0);

stream_ns.onStatus = function(info)
{
    if(info.code = "NetStream.Play.Start")
    {

        stream_ns.pause();
    }
}
```
In terms of your ASPX talking to your Flash, you could pass the FLV video name to Flash via FlashVars so that your SWF would know what thumbnail to show.