Playing my movies with Flowplayer

Tero Piirainen, 12.04.2008

I took a short movie clip from myself while I was tap dancing. I was using Canon Ixus 70 digital camera that I just placed on the floor - plain and simple.

Back home I was wondering how this could be shown with Flowplayer. First I copied my video file from the camera to my PC. I used a memory card reader for that. I realized that it was an AVI file about 200 MB in size. I looked at Flowplayer features and saw that AVI files are not supported directly and they must be converted to a suitable format.

How to do that? Quick search on google revealed that there are plenty of licenced, shareware and freeware products that can accomplish this. They all seemed to be graphical interfaces to a command line program called ffmpeg. Althought small in size it sees to do everything you need with video, image and audio. Just look at this list of supported file formats that can be manipulated! You'll easily get an headache. Anyway I realized that this tool was supported on linux, windows and macs and all platforms also had some sort of graphical interface build on top of the tool.

Personally I have Linux so plain old command line approach is just fine for me. While looking at the ffmpeg documentation I got a little stressed and information overload was absolutely present. But after several Google searches I accomplished to find a minimal command line that could possibly do my conversion.

ffmpeg -i MVI_4400.AVI -vcodec flv tap-dance.flv

And it very well did it! I simply gave my input file, one parameter (vcodec) and name of the output file. As a result I got a FLV file which is supported by Flash based players. Resulted file size was around 4 MB in size so there really is a reason for the conversion other than just changing the format. As we all know smaller file sizes are better on the web.

Playing around with other formats

How about Apple QuickTime movies? Those that have .mov file extension. I gave a quick try for some file on my disc. Without reading any manuals I just tried my previous command with .mov file.

ffmpeg -i timesteptriple.mov -vcodec flv movie.flv 

and to my surprice it worked! I began to like my new tool. Well I got greedy and took another test with an .mpg file. This video standard is supported by many playback devices - too many to even mention. Web has zillions of vides on this format. Here is my command

ffmpeg -i "Videos/The National - Fake Empire.mpg" -vcodec flv movie.flv 

Bang! Success again.

Moving to Windows

I wanted to try ffmpeg on windows. I went to ffmpeg website and chosea page that listed different products using ffmpeg. As you can see you have many different options. I chose Riva VX because I have heard about it before. This time we are dealing with a graphical interface. I downloaded and installed it in into my computer. On the right you can see how it looked.

I took one MPG file from my computer as a test. I placed it into "Input video" field and pressed "Encode" button. FLV file was indeed generated. My original file went from 40 MB to 13 MG in size. With different settings you can get smaller files with reduced quality.

I didn't like this product a lot because it complaied too much about my settings by saying "unsupported combination of parameters". If you have time and patience to look around for better product please give me a hint to: tero@flowplayer.org.

Anyway I played my test file in Flowplayer and it indeed worked.

Apple Users

I personally don't own a Mac but I can use Google. I ran into ffmpegX which is Open Source and looked simple. Something I would like to have on Windows and Linux as well. Here is a small preview of the product.

I cannot give you any test results but I found this tutorial on the web that looks promising.

Supported video formats

Here is a short description of the video formats Flowplayer supports.

format	description	advantages	disadvantages
FLV	Most played video format on the web. YouTube and Google Videos are using it	Basically all clients with Flash capability can see these videos. Has been there since version 6.	Referred to a proprietary file format and does not offer as good video and audio quality as H.264 does.
H.264	A video compression standard.	Provides good video quality at lower bit rates than FLV. As a standard it is not Apple's proprietary format.	Only supported since Flash version 9.115. Not everybody has this including myself.
MP4	Another video compression standard.	just like H.264	just like H.264

Flowplayer goes High Quality

This video is in H.264 format. Be sure to see the quality in full screen also! The dimensions in this are 1280x720 and you will need enough bandwidth to view it properly. You might need to pre-buffer it enough before hitting play.

If you really want to know more about different video formats I suggest reading this page from Wikipedia. I liked it personally.