What Is the Best Tool to Convert Common Video Formats to Flv on a Linux Cli

What is the best tool to convert common video formats to FLV on a Linux CLI

Flash can play the following formats:

FLV with AAC or MP3 audio, and FLV1 (Sorenson Spark H.263), VP6, or H.264 video.
MP4 with AAC or MP3 audio, and H.264 video (mp4s must be hinted with qt-faststart or mp4box).

ffmpeg is an overall good conversion utility; mencoder works better with obscure and proprietary formats (due to the w32codecs binary decoder package) but its muxing is rather suboptimal (read: often totally broken). One solution might be to encode H.264 with x264 through mencoder, and then mux separately with mp4box.

As a developer of x264 (and avid user of flash for online video playback), I've had quite a bit of experience in this kind of stuff, so if you want more assistance I'm also available on Freenode IRC on #x264, #ffmpeg, and #mplayer.

Programmatically convert a video to FLV

You basically have two choices if you want to host, transcode and stream flv files (and don't want to buy a video transcoding application): you can call out to FFMpeg/MEncoder or you can use an external Web service. You could also sidestep the problem completely by allowing them to embed YouTube videos on your site.

If you go the 'local FFMpeg route' I would suggest simply using ProcessBuilder and constructing a command-line to execute FFMpeg. That way you get full control over what gets executed, you avoid JNI, which is an absolute nightmare to work with, and you keep OS-specific code out of your app. You can find FFMPeg with all the bells and whistles for pretty much any platform. There's a good chance it's already on your server.

The nice thing about the 'Local FFMPeg' route is that you don't have to pay for any extra hosting, and everything is running locally, although your hosting admin might start complaining if you're using a crazy amount of disk and CPU. There are some other StackOverflow questions that talk about some of the gotchas using FFMpeg to create flvs that you can actually play in the flash player.

The Web service route is nice because there is less setup involved. I have not used Hey!Watch but it looks promising. PandaStream is easy to set up and it works well, plus you get all your videos on S3 with no additional effort.

How can I get the resolution (width and height) for a video file from a linux command line?

MediaInfo has a command line version and provides the dimensions together with tons of other information.

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