Summersault Blog

As a Linux user, I’m a fan of “Flash Video” for Video content delivery on the web, used most visibly now by Google Video.

Flash video depends only on the Flash plugin, which nearly everyone has, is well supported on Linux and seems to generally “just work”. There also seems to be a lot of flexibility to integrate the player with the design of a particular website, which is a nice feature for developers.

Finally, Flash video is nice for the smaller file sizes of the video format. For example, converting my AVI file to the FLV format reduced the file size by about 75%!

I was pleased to find that there are already free, open source tools that allow me to publish content in the FLV using Linux. (But I believe the same tools could also work on Mac and Windows and provide some pointers for those platforms at the bottom.)

The software I used was ffmpeg, flvtool and FlowPlayer.

ffmpeg is a command line graphics converter that packaged for popular Linux distributions. However, the version available for Mandriva 2006 did not produce any sound in the output file. To get that to work, I had to compile my own version from CVS. Since I already had some of the things I needed installed to complete that process, my process went like this terminal session run as root:

# Un-install the ffmpeg I tried from Mandriva 2006
$ urpme ffmpeg
$ urpmi liblame0-devel
$ cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co ffmpeg
$ cd ffmpeg
$ ./configure --enable-mp3lame
$ make

$  checkinstall --install=yes

Your Mileage May Vary.

The last step could have been just make install, but using checkinstall checkinstall is recommended over just “make install” because it creates a formal package that you can easily uninstall. It will prompt you for some optional information, like a version number. For best results, specify a version number higher than the version of ffmpeg you have installed, if any.

flvtool2 is another command line tool requires the Ruby package to be installed, but can be run directly where you unpack the “.tar.gz” archive. (No special installation is needed). Its purpose in the the process is to update the file with some metadata needed to play it.

Finally, FlowPlayer is a very easy to use Flash Video player. While I won’t repeat their instructions, basically you can copy and paste some HTML and change an example file name to be the one of your file.

With the software installed, here are the actual commands I used to create an FLV file from an AVI file on my digital camera:

$ cd ~/Videos
$ ffmpeg -i orig.avi out.flv

$ cd ~/Applications/flvtool
$ ./flvtool2 -U ~/Videos/out.flv

From there, FlowPlayer has simple documentation for making Flash Video display within a player on your website.

See Also:

• Checkinstall: A safe way to try out cutting edge Linux software.
• ffmpegX - A GUI for ffmpeg on Mac OS X.
• PSPEnc - A GUI for ffmpeg on Windows.

( I haven’t tried the Windows and Mac software and can’t answer questions about it!)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Desktop Software, Internet / Networking, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.