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.
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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
i am using videojs to play video on my website(it's a HTML5 website) so for a better support i need to make 3 formats of each video mp4,webM,ogv.
But in my website user can upload video also.
So please tell me how can i automatically convert videos after/while uploading to these formats.
I am using PHP5+JS for development.
As the conversion will need to happen on the server side, you will only be able to do this once the upload has been completed. HTML5 is great but is does not support video transcoding.
I would suggest to have a look at ffmpeg, it's an extremely powerful command line utility that allow you transcode your video's with the finest precision, in fact youtube uses this to convert their video's as well.
It is a free tool and there is more than enough documentation to get you started at
http://ffmpeg.org/
We have a system set up in PHP where the upload occurs, conversion then takes place and the videos appear to the clients once the conversion is complete. However, one thing to note... I have always had trouble with ffmpeg conversions for iPhone, iPad, iPod, iOS, etc.
I am in requirement of a player & video format that is supported on all desktop/laptop browser, and even on android and iphone, server is based on PHP
What I am right now using is .mov with H.264, which does not work on android, and sometimes not even in firefox
Help appreciated.
Thanks.
The fact that you are using PHP is irrelevant because PHP doesn't do video processing.
If you're trying to do video processing, your best bet will be getting ffmpeg installed, which you can call from your PHP script to process video.
You're probably going to want to store videos in the following formats, in order of likely-to-be-playable-hood:
FLV, Flash's video container, combined with a Flash video player. This will hit the largest chunk of your audience.
MPEG4 / H.264 will play in some systems that don't have Flash, including Apple's devices. Watch out, the H.264 codec is burdened by software patents and a commercial licensing scheme.
WebM (sometimes known as VP8) will soon play in everything else that doesn't support Flash or H.264.
For formats 2 and 3, you'll want to look at the HTML5 video tag, which will work in all modern browsers. Those modern browsers will also conveniently support those two formats. You'll want to read that link for a great deal more information about video handling, including a section on WebM encoding using ffmpeg and sections on mobile devices.
(There's also Ogg Theora, but nobody loves it enough.)
So I have users who have told me they are interested in being able to upload videos to my site straight from DVD's (for which they own the rights, of course).
I've never encountered this before, but I would imagine this would take an enormous amount of resources and would clog up the servers, which I would like to avoid.
A basic google search returns numerous DVD to FLV converters but all seem to appear to be applications which would need to be used to convert the files before uploading.
So, if this isn't a horrible idea, how would I go about implementing it using PHP or any Linux command line tool?
Or if this is insane, Why is this a bad idea? and What are other possible alternatives?
As an example, I could see an alternative being:
showing information about how to convert the files to a valid upload format before uploading
Search for ffmpeg - i don't know does it reads DVD files, but most of video formats can, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libavcodec
It's a command line program, which can convert between many video formats.
You can't avoid huge load on server, because converting video simply require lot of computations. Maybe there is a way to restrict resources that program takes and slow it down - but it will have cost in execution time. On multi-core server, only one core will be loaded when converting video, so maybe this is not a problem ?
Remeber that uploading large files (like DVD video is) can also be a problem, and you should watch to nice uploader with progress bar (for example flash uploader)
I need to stream an flv file.
Streaming should look like live streaming,
and I there should be a way to change the target file.
Sorry for my poor English.
If by "streaming" you mean "showing a flash-video clip", flv-streaming isn't really streaming, but it's a normal file transfer, with the flash player starting playback even if the file isn't completely downloaded to the client. Time seeking is implemented in a standard HTTP way, with a file download offset - if you scroll the video halfway on the timeline and it hasn't downloaded yet, the current download is (most often) aborted, and restarted with an offset of filesize/2 bytes.
So, you could be fine with just using plain old readfile() and fixing the HTTP mime-type headers appropriately with header(). But, since you'd need seeking, you need to parse the HTTP request and instead of readfile(), use fpassthru(), seeking the right place, instead.
tl;dr: Avoid handling this on the PHP side, and let Apache (or the httpd of your choice) handle this instead.
I'm not quite sure what you're asking about, but if you have a bunch of media files and want to play them with a Youtube-esque media player on your website, I suggest checking out Flowplayer - It has an amazing Javascript API that lets you do all kinds of cool stuff to the player, including handling stuff like playlists and programmatically changing the current video.
I recently used it on a project with great results.