I basically need to record a video of the flash stage, and save it as a video file on the webserver. I don't have FMS or the luxury of Java based servers like Red5 to stream to, so I am pretty much stuck with HTTP post to a php script. Now I can grab invidual snapshots (bitmapDatas) Just fine, but how can I convert them to a video file? Any help is appreciated.
PS: This is not an AIR app, so I am using flash runtime. And the video would be couple seconds long so there shouldn't be much of a performance concern at this point.
Flex provide a JPEG encoder. You can use that to compress the bitmap images and send them to the server, where you can that stitch them together using ffmpeg.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/mx/graphics/codec/JPEGEncoder.html
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I need to make a live streaming webcam application from my php server to a php page. I could either take frame by frame pictures using flash and somehow convert them to video files and stream it through or bundle the images together, compress them, and outputting it on a web page. any help with php methods to convert images to videos and outputting them on a web page?
I could either take frame by frame pictures using flash
I did this once. Result? An awful, CPU hogging mess. It worked, no doubt about that. But it was terrible. Because the images had to be encoded every 500ms (half a second), my CPU (Intel i7 4 cores) went up to 70% in usage. So I suggest you stay away from that method unless of course, you want your users to kill you?
I would suggest taking a look at the Flash Media Server. It's not free but there is a free trial for you to try. Here, take a look at this.
We've currently developed an ExpressionEngine site (php), and are using a paid JWPlayer to display video uploaded by the client.
At present we're running into a number of issues, as the client is:
Uploading video at the wrong size
Uploading video randomly in both flv or mp4 format
And the player is chugging along terribly with multiple pauses throughout the video - sometimes buffering the entire clip before it is played.
I know FFMPEG can be installed serverside, but I'm not sure of the way in which to go about this, and how it might interact between ExpressionEngine and JWPlayer. I'm also not sure about the formatting - the ability for this automated encoding process to also crop/resize the video to suit the player dimensions on the site.
We would really like to have the videos playable on all browsers & iOS devices.
A HQ option would also be great where applicable, but it's just a nice to have - as we're struggling with the formatting / encoding issues first and foremost.
Any help figuring out the best process, and what tools I might need would be greatly appreciated.
I'd reccomend using a service like zencoder
I've used them in the past and no matter what video format I've thrown at them it works great. (PS. I'm not affiliated with them at all)
There is a PHP API with a whole lot of resizing, quality and format options. After you've uploaded your video you can send it to zencoder and they'll send you a response some time later with success or fail.
They can put the processed video on Amazon S3 or FTP it to a server.
You'll need a HTML5 player for iOS devices though, unless JWPlayer has come a long way since I used it last.
You could get zencoder to output in mp4. and then you still only need mp4 for JWPlayer/flash and the HTML5 version for iOS, as long as your happy to use flash for all desktop browsers there's no problem.
As far as the buffering issues you are having - I have found that using a CDN version of the swf for JWPlayer (or whatever player you are using) has caused it to load the entire video file before playing. Easily fixed by hosting it yourself.
I have found many times the video conversion capabilities of different CMS to be limited, and often restricting video formats to what the developers thought was appropriate, such as FLV, which nowadays is turning obsolete for video delivery.
One of the ways you can approach it is by creating a custom script to process the videos uploaded by your client using FFmpeg, which in fact can accept almost any video format, and generate the correct output formats and dimensions, ensuring that the resulting videos will be suitable for web playback using your player.
The problem with the video buffering you are facing is because the video file is not prepared for progressive download or pseudo-streaming, so your browser needs to download the whole video before starting to play. This can be solved with programs like qt-faststart for MP4 and MOV video files, and flvtool2 for FLV files. So your script would need to also optimize the encoded videos using these tools.
Also note that if you use an HTML5 video player (browser native or recent JWPlayer), then you can enjoy from random seeking the video files without buffering them.
If starting from scratch is not an option, you can look into a commercial solution like tremendum transcoder which also uses FFmpeg and is quite simple to use, yet it does all you need in regards to dealing with different input formats and aspect ratios automatically.
I have done a few setups this way, separating the CMS part from the video processing part, and it saved me some headaches.
I am developing a website in php hosted on a shared linux server.
I need to allow the users of my site to upload and play flv videos with flowplayer.
It would be fantastic to show a snapshot of the video before it starts, something like these: http://flowplayer.org/demos/plugins/streaming/first-frame.html
My server doesn't support pseudostreaming and it has no ffmpeg/mplayer support (it's a shared host after all...)
I am guessing how can I take a snapshot of the nth frame of the video with only php or javascript or action script.
I read something about bitmapdata class in flash >= 8, but i don't know how to do all the work automatically without the user's input.
Can someone help me?
Thanks.
AFAIK - if your server doesn't have ffmpeg, you're not going to be able to do it with PHP.
You definitely can't do it with JS.
Which leaves AS - you can create a bitmap from any display object, and save that as an image file with PHP, both of which are pretty straightforward - but you're not going to be able to run through the video to find the first frame... with AS, the image "snapshot" is the exact current visible state of the display object.
if that is enough - taking the current state of a display object and saving it as an image file - post back and i'll link a sample.
If you're on a shared Linux server, you might have ImageMagick installed. That in turn may be able to extract a screenshot of a particular frame from a movie. However this will probably only work on AVI files - MPEG movies require ffmpeg, and I am not sure about FLV files (they're not in the list of supported formats on the IM website).
Could you switch to a VPS? This will give you the root access you need to install the conversion binaries you need. These days a reasonable one with 256M-512M of RAM will cost you from 5USD pcm depending on the quality and support (I pay 4GBP pcm for a 512M box and it really has been rock solid).
If i send bitmap data from Flash AS3, to PHP and then PHP turns the bitmap data into a image file and saves on server... Would it take too much resources?
I mean, The Bitmap Data could contain too much pixels etc does that affect the resources?
If 10-100 people send data simultaneously is it going to cause problems...
What kind of specs are you looking for to do this thing?
This is impossible to answer without knowing your server specs and the kind of application you're building.
But before it even comes to that - I don't speak AS3, but surely Flash can do the conversion into an image file by itself? That would put the load on the client machine, which can deal with it easily. Sending the finished file to a PHP process is a much less resource-consuming task.
It's 100kb in compressed as jpg but when it comes to bmp it could make for a 1024x768 image, 2MB . That is the default download limit for generic php installation. To process on the image it takes nearly same amount of memory.
In conclusion, It wont be a problem
You can do the encoding in Flash. This article should show you how to do it
http://henryjones.us/articles/using-the-as3-jpeg-encoder
Hello is there a way in PHP to save an image from video/quicktime video ?
It's not possible in pure PHP. You would have to use an external command line tool like ffmpeg - but that makes the script less portable to other servers.
The only other idea that comes to mind is the Snapshot plugin to the LongTail Video player. With that, you can manually send snapshots of a video playing in the video player (an embeddable Flash player) to a server side script. The process can't be automated, though, and the video will need to be a FLV or MP4 one for this to work.