μHOWTO: Convert and display Flash video

20070410 16:58 by javier

So you want to publish that nice family video in your page/blog/intranet without forcing your visitors to download, install and activate some obscure browser plugin and *then* wait for a 200MB download… Well.. That’s easy as cake!
First, let’s use ffmpeg to convert the video from avi, mpg or mov to something that we can stream to a nice Flash video player:

$ sudo aptitude install ffmpeg
$ ffmpeg -i video.mpg -ar 11025 -s 320×240 video.flv

Then we extract the first frame of the video to use it as a thumbnail:

$ ffmpeg -y -i video.mpg -f image2 -ss 5 -vframes 1 -s 320×240 -an video.jpg

Of course, real men brew their own Flash video players using Ming. The rest of us have to settle for one that has been pre-made, like Jeroen Wijering’s most excellent Flash Video Player. To insert the video in a web page you just have to write

You know, there’s even a neat wordpress plugin that allows a much simpler syntax:

[flv:/path/to/video.flv 320 240]

Cool, eh? Now you are ready to take over YouTube!

Tags: flash, video, flvplayer, ming, ffmpeg, wordpress

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 16:58 and is filed under Blog, General, Hack!, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.