I need to embed videos on a client's website and they have given the following guidelines:
must be viewable as flash (FLV format)
if hosted by outside company (e.g. Youtube) the video can not link back to the outside company's website
if hosted by outside company (e.g. Youtube) the video can not have any advertisements of the outside company
I guess what I'm looking for is an AVI-to-FLV converter?
Your client's requirements preclude using YouTube. You're probably better off hosting them on the client's site.
Flash will import your AVI movies and convert them to FLV. You can find the video import tool under File -> Import -> Import Video.
You can use Riva VX on windows or ffmpegX on Mac.
The "best" way? FFmpeg is the answer to that, its cross platform and you can easily script it.
ffmpeg -i input.avi -acodec libmp3lame -vcodec flv output.flv
If you want a tool to do it (requires a human), I suggest Miro http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/
Super© converts anything to anything .. couldnt live without it. Got a whacked out UI but I'm willing to deal with it.
The Mobile Media Converter from Miksoft is the best. it allows you to do batch conversion of files and also allows you to set the output quality. It is also FREE.
Related
I'm writing an Chrome Packaged App that needs to be able to play a lot of local video files. I can use the tag to play files encoded in h.264 and mp3, but not much else. I'll require playback of at least DivX videos and AC3 audio. Is there any way to do this using the HTML5 platform or otherwise using some kind of plugin?
There are alternatives, but in my opinion the final solution is not going to be very good.
1 - You can try to use a plug-in, for example:
VLC Plug-in - sorry, I have not enough reputation to post more than 2 links :(
Divx Web Player - sorry, I have not enough reputation to post more than 2 links :(
But then you need to rely on the user installing the plug-in. For VLC, the plug-in is not compatible with the latest versions of Mac OS X.
2 - Encode to H.264 or VP8 from a server with an ffmpeg or using a cloud video provider.
3 - Encode from the client side using JavaScript! There is a port of the ffmpeg on javascript (http://bgrins.github.io/videoconverter.js/). I didn't try this method with large files.
4 - Encode from the client side using a Native Client component (https://developers.google.com/native-client/dev/). But seems a daunting task to me.
If you are going to go with the first option, assure that your audience is going to install/configure your player and that their OS are supported.
VLC ported to NaCL would be a great first step.
According to a poster on https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=107178, libVLC has been ported to NaCL, but I am not familiar with VLC internals so I could not say how far this gets you in terms of being able to decode different streams.
I am trying to encode a live stream into Apple HLS for iPhone on windows. I was looking at different options and wowza can do it, but doesn't support CDN distribution of HLS as far as I can see. Plus it costs a lot of money.
What I did find was this site: http://www.espend.de/artikel/iphone-ipad-ipod-http-streaming-segmenter-and-m3u8-windows.html
I can now set up a single bitrate stream easily, but my goal is an adapive multi-bitrate live stream. Is it possible? For VOD content it can easily be accomplished with creating the different qualities then linking to them in a new m3u8, but how would this be done in live?
I can of course set up three quality live streams and link to them in an m3u8, but how will I get them GOP-aligned in this case?
My initial thought was to have one ffmpeg instance create all qualities and re-stream those outputs to new ffmpeg-instances that just remux and pipe to the segmenter. But I would need some way of streaming locally between instances. Can that be done?
If anyone has a nice solution to this, or can link to other software capable of live HLS on windows, I would appreciate any input.
Have a great day!
Regards
Carl
Just to let people know, I ended up using http://www.ioncannon.net/projects/http-live-video-stream-segmenter-and-distributor/ on a linux virtualbox and it works great. I had trouble compiling it, but there were a couple of forks that fixed those problems.
I have a webservice returning .flv file, it has to be played in iphone application, how do i play a .flv (flash file) in iphone?
Does anyone has faced this scenario? Programmatically is it possible to convert to some format and play in iphone?
Thanks.
IPhone doesn't and judging by the Apple official statements won't ever (or at least in the forseeable future) support flash content.
Converting the content to another format on the server side should be easy to do and would allow content playback on an iDevice.
SInce the video is probably already h.264 encoded inside the FLV container, you may want to try FLV Extract on the server to avoid recompression:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools/FLV_Extract
Basically you just need to run it once for each of the videos on the server and keep the results around.
I would recommend setting up your webservice to use something like ffmpeg ( http://www.ffmpeg.org/ ) to convert the .flv file to an mp4 file which can be played directly from the iPhone's web browser.
Pioto and Josaih are on the right track in suggesting that you should convert the video server-side using a tool like FFMpeg. As far as I know there is zero support for flv in any part of iOS, so you'd be unable to transcode it locally. Even if you could, it would make your users angry, since transcoding is a resource-intensive process that would kill their battery life and take a significant amount of time.
So, your solution is to transcode your videos to h.264 server-side. However, I'd caution against transcoding from flv->h.264 if there are any other options available. If you have the original, uncompressed (or at least less-compressed) source video available, you'll get higher-quality video by transcoding that to h.264. Each time lossy compression (eg, squeeze or h.264) is used on a file, you lose some information and quality. If you've ever seen a 3rd or 4th generation copy of a VHS tape, you can understand what I'm getting at.
Once you have a h.264 formatted video, you can play it on iOS. Not sure about the exact details of this.
You may be able to use ffmpeg or something on your server to transcode it to H.264. I'm not so sure you would really want to do that transcoding on the phone. Given Apple's current stance on Flash, this is probably your best option.
For FLV files, what I do is I upload them on Google Drive and watch them from Google Drive app.
I am building this iphone app for a client and they have a large set of flash video files that they need to play/stream to the iphone. I understand that the iphone doesnt natively support flv playback but isnt there anything I can do to get around this problem?
In case it helps, they are using the akamai flash player on their website to play these video files.
Thanks in advance.
Yes! - You can convert all the videos to m4v format.
There's a javascript hack available, but it will only work if it's installed on the clients web server. It's also pretty clunky and slow and will likely murder battery life.
A workaround, since you're working with video, is to convert to mp4 format.
Short answer: no flash, but conversion will do what you need.
akamai actually supports "auto-packaging" of h.264 content which may be your best option here. By uploading 1 or more h.264 files you can use those to both serve your Flash player, and akamai will also auto-package them for iPhone (chunking them into .ts files and creating an .m3u8 reference file for dynamic mobile streaming).
This allows you to not have separate encodes for mobile and web, thus saving money and time so you can leverage your existing archive.
I need to convert image sequences(ie,png) to video file in iPhone. How i can convert the images to video.
Regards,
Just ignore bad advice like "use ffmpeg". That would work on the desktop, but the license issue makes including ffmpeg source code in your iPhone app legally questionable. Apple provides a class named AVAssetWriter that you would use in your app to encode a series of images as h.264 stored in a .m4v quicktime container file. While the apple provided logic does work, it is not so easy to actually use and you will need to read quite a lot of documentation to get the code working. If you want to skip implementing it yourself (and likely save yourself 3 or 4 days of work), please consider using my AVAnimator library for iOS as the h.264 encoding logic is already implemented in the class AVAssetWriterConvertFromMaxvid. Once encoded as h.264, the video can be played with the standard player and it is small enough to upload to a remote server.
You are likely going to need something like FFMPEG