AVI to FLV with ffmpeg

Monday, June 9th, 2008

I used to have all my videos on my website as divx or xvid encoded AVI. This is a pain as you have to download the files to play them.

I found FlowPlayer and it works really well. I used to use flvtool to encode videos as flv files but it is not part of gentoo and I had to keep manually downloading and building it all the time to get the updates.

I recently found this article which shows how to use ffmpeg to encode videos as flv files.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x256 video.flv

I then use the flv with FlowPlayer like this

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    data="/include/FlowPlayer.swf"
    width="320"
    height="284"
    id="FlowPlayer1">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
  <param name="movie" value="/include/FlowPlayer.swf" />
  <param name="quality" value="high" />
  <param name="scale" value="noScale" />
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
  <param name="allowNetworking" value="all" />

  <param name="flashvars" value="config={
		autoPlay: false,
		loop: false,
		initialScale: 'scale',
		showLoopButton: false,
		showPlayListButtons: false,
		playList: [
			{ url: '/media/tux_07.flv' }
		]
		}" />
</object>

See Hintertux 2007 for an example.

Hintertux Video Processing

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Well, this is crazy. We are back from Hintertux and now its time to start processing the video. My new Helmet cam means that I have loads of footage. 57Gb of raw dv files.

I have started watching the clips and chopping them up into little clips in Cinelerra. Its really a very good application. In my opinion its better than most. The motion tracking and stabilisation is really good.

I did have one problem and it didn’t really like using the XVID AVI files which my helmet camera made so I converted all the files to raw DV files. I used ffmpeg to do this.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -target pal-dv video.dv

I’ve been processing for days already and I still haven’t processed half of the footage.