[quote=&quot;webheadtech&quot;]see this http://www.yobt.tv 
look at a video and watch how it creates a thumb nail pic of each part of the movie
then as the movie plays you can see the thumb nail move as the video plays
you can select the thumb nail pic to go to that part
the thumb nail pic and the FLV viewer are separate i think,
what tool is used to convert this?
[/quote]

The player and thumbnail viewer are one Flash file.

You can use ffmpeg to generate thumbnails of a video.  Including videos in FLV format.  It's a command line tool.  If you need a GUI then I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

http://www.ffmpeg.org/about.html ( http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2008/03/29/creating-video-thumbnails-using-ffmpeg/ )

You can use the GD libraries for any complex manipulation of the thumbnails.  PHP supports GD:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/book.image.php

And GD is supported in Perl, Ruby, Python etc...  Look at phpMotion for examples of GD and ffmpeg.

You'd send the thumbnails and any metadata to Flash.  ActionScript does the rest.

There are some cool things being thought up in HTML 5 for interacting with video content ( http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#video ).  HTML 5 isn't even &quot;finalized&quot; yet so don't expect to see full support in any current browser (not that any browser had full support of any &quot;standard&quot; anyway).  Best bet is to get FireFox 3.5 if you want to fuck with HTML 5.

http://www.youtube.com/html5
http://shapeshed.com/examples/HTML5-video-element/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdf0x8am1cg

Don't have code examples to hand out.  You'll have to use Google.

[quote=&quot;webheadtech&quot;]
another question
i want to pass out a link with some movies on it
but i want the link to expire at a certain date
i need some kind of link generator and i dont want to keep having to manually do it at my website by changing it or deleting it[/quote]

http://drop.io/  Allows files to expire after 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or 1 year.  Not exactly a certain date but close.

phpBB also has pruning and post attachments.  You can share files through phpBB and use pruning to delete old posts.