The question is similar to: Is there any way to create a video thumbnail through PHP without ffmpeg? However, that thread is 6-year old and technologies have evolved since then.
Any way to extract a thumbnail from uploaded MP4 file using PHP?
Ffmpeg is great, but unfortunately unsupported on shared hosting accounts, requiring a dedicated server. And it's a kinda overkill to use ffmpeg's power just to generate a video preview picture.
Any other simple solution?