How to create videos from images with php?

My first thought was to shell out to the ffmpeg command with something like this.

Creating a Video from Images

ffmpeg can be used to stitch several images together into a video. There are many options, but the following example should be enough to get started. It takes all images that have filenames of XXXXX.morph.jpg, where X is numerical, and creates a video called "output.mp4". The qscale option specifies the picture quality (1 is the highest, and 32 is the lowest), and the "-r" option is used to specify the number of frames per second.

ffmpeg -r 25 -qscale 2 -i %05d.morph.jpg output.mp4

(The website that this blurb was taken from is gone. Link has been removed.)

Where 25 means 25 images per second. You could set this to 1 for a slight (1 sec) delay or use decimals, IE: 0.5 for a 2 second delay.

You can then combine a video and audio stream with something like this.

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -i audio.mp3 -c:v copy -c:a aac -b:a 128k final.mp4

Of course choose your appropriate codecs. If you want an mp4 use libx264 for video and aac (built into ffmpeg and no longer "experimental") for audio.

Just remember that if you choose to use a method like this that ffmpeg output goes, by default, to stderr for when you try to read it. It can be redirected to stdout if you prefer.

The first thing that came to mind for me was imagemagick. I've used it with PHP for a lot of image manipulation and I know it supports reading a decent amount of video formats and according to that link it supports writing to some too.

yes, ffmpeg is the right solution for you. i just recently made something similar - a video site with animated thumbnails. i used ffmpeg to put together images in an aminated gif. however, the output can be whatever you need... unfortunately, in my searches into this topic i have not found any sample code that would combine all the points you are after, so i suppose you will have to try manually with ffmpeg... in my project i used php video toolkit http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpvideotoolkit/ in some parts to make it a bit easier...