We have developed flash video player which needs to playe large videos (at least 500 MB videos).
We have some issues in the player right now.
I am playing a 100 MB + video, it start playing and say it is buffering upto 50% of that video. Then I am closing that page. If I take that video again, it starts downloading from beginning. It never resume downloading from where it buffered previous time. But for small video files, this is looking ok. Is there any size limit a video player can buffer? or any other issues. Please share your thoughts
Is there any better way to play large videos (more than 500 MB). Any other protocol or any other settings in flash player? Please give your valid suggestions here also...
If streaming video is out of the question (eg servers are expensive) you may also try a modified-progressive download. The server basically takes the browser request and cuts a specific version of the video which it then sends to the user's browser. I know there are extensions of this for various popular servers. Infact, this is very similar (if not , the same) as what youtube uses.
Some references to gawk at:
Mod H264 Streaming for Apache
FlowPlayer Pseudostreaming
Serving up a video file using php
Related
I am using WAMP server 2.4. I am streaming MP4 videos. Whenever i request video to stream it took around 3-4 mins to start streaming and once streaming is started it works fine.
I am unable to figure out why it takes to much time to start streaming.
I have tried following link as well but it didn't solve my issue.
Load mod_h264_streaming.dll in Windows Apache2
Please help
Are you using Flash or HTML5 or else to playback the video?
It sounds like the browser/client is trying to get the full length file before playing it back. It could be due to the fact that your MP4 file is not properly formatted for the web (MOOV ATOM is at the end of the file and playback cannot begin without it). You can read there for more info.
I would suggest two things:
try with a short 10 sec file and see if it plays rapidly
try a software like handbrake (or MP4Box or ffmpeg if you are more advanced on file transcoding) to transcode your MP4 with the "web optimized" (aka "fast start") check box active.
Let us know if it works.
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.
Is it possible to play the video (mp4) in real time using some flash player? What I mean by in real-time is that player would receive data on the fly, not from alredy saved file but e.g. php script (which sends appropriate content-type header) THAT IS DOWNLOADING AND 'ECHO-ing' THE FILE AT THE TIME PLAYER PLAYS IT - like e.g. some kind of live stream.
JW Player can play streaming video, and LongTail Video also has some good (practical) info on streaming in general:
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/search/google_cse_adv/streaming
Edit: Maybe I didn't read the question quite as well as i ought to before I answered, but here is info on so called pseudo streaming that can be implemented in PHP:
http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/jw-player/jw-player-for-flash-v5/12534/video-delivery-http-pseudo-streaming
For instant playback using flash, you need to format your mp4 file to have the moov header box at the front of the file for playback to start right away. This can be done by the qt-faststart utility.
To allow for seeking in the file using flash (to a portion of the file not downloaded) you need to utilize pseudo streaming. (Since flash has disabled the partial bytes header). This needs to be implemented on the server side: http://h264.code-shop.com/trac as well as the flash side (both jwplayer and flowplayer supports this approach, and sends ?start=123 param on seek)
The other option is to use the html5 tag (but mp4 is only supported in a few browsers) - then you do not need the pseudostreaming backend.
You can use VLC media player from:
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
After you successfully installed it, click on the menu Media->Open Network Stream and fill in the URL for the video.
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.