A good friend of mine called this evening asking about FFmpeg for Windows. It’s been well over a year since I’ve downloaded a Windows version and was able to find a link here:

http://download.videohelp.com/download/ffmpeggui03c.zip

It’s a GUI version of FFmpeg and looks fairly straightforward to use. It definitely abstracts you from having to enter a crazy command such as:

ffmpeg -i file.avi -y -f vcd -vcodec mpeg1video -map 0.0:0.0 -b 1150 -s 352×240 -r 29.97 -g 12 -qmin 3 -qmax 13 -hq -acodec mp2 -ab 224 -ar 44100 -ac 2 -map 0.1:0.1 movie.mpg

As detailed here. Below is a screenshot of the GUI and Steve, let me know if you run into any probs and send me a copy of your masterpiece!

USAT has a very creative press release around enabling Santa’s workforce with LBS. I will let you make the judgement call on whether or not this is real, but it’s highly entertaining and has some great quotes. My favorite piece of the press release is the network topology diagram:

I think it’s very effective when companies use certain events, holidays, and hypothetical scenarios to spread the word about their offering.  One thing’s for sure, I can guarantee that no other company in their space is doing anything like this.  Genius.

A reader named Rich recently asked if I’d had any success exporting FLV to 3GPP format. I’ve exported QuickTime movies (.mov) to 3GPP in the past, but have never tried converting from FLV. I did a post last year showing how to convert MOV to 3GPP.
Luckily the syntax for converting FLV to 3GPP is nearly identical and looks like the following:

ffmpeg -i airplane.flv -r 15 -b 50 -s sqcif -an test.3gp

The source file came from this YouTube page and was easily converted to 3GPP format using FFmpeg. You can see it running in the QuickTime player here:

and this should run on most mobile phones supporting video as well.  Let’s take a quick look at the parameters:

-r set frame rate (Hz value, fraction or abbreviation)
-b set video bitrate (in kbit/s)
-s set frame size (WxH or abbreviation) sqcif stands for sub-quarter common interchange format and is represented by 128×96
-an disable audio

Unfortunately I had to disable audio because FFmpeg kept throwing an error.  I’ll have to dig into this some more and see what I can find out.  Please let me know if you’re able to encode audio and I’ll be glad to update this post.  I hope this helps.

My father-in-law recently submitted Ella’s photo to the Austin American-Statesman paper for their “Scared of Santa” section. This photo was taken last Christmas (2005) and was her first encounter with Santa. She landed the front page and you can see a thumbnail and full photo below. Both Santa’s and Ella’s expressions are priceless.

Let me start with a disclaimer that I’m not endorsing the distribution of YouTube videos in other video formats or even saving them to your computer. This was simply a proof of concept of taking a video from YouTube and having the ability to watch it offline. Also, with my never-ending quest to master FFmpeg and it’s encoding capabilities I wanted to see if I could encode Flash video files to QuickTime. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to encode different video formats to FLV and thought it would be interesting to go in the other direction.

This howto was accomplished using the following tools: Live HTTP headers for Firefox and FFmpeg on Linux. I can’t see this being any different for Windows, but would like to hear if the process varies. I decided to start with the crazy video of this guy flying a tiny twin engine airplane:

When the video starts playing a request is made YouTube’s servers asking for the appropriate FLV file. This can be viewed through Live HTTP headers as seen below:

If you copy this URL and paste it in your browser you’ll be prompted to save this file to your computer. The original file size for this file was about 8MB. After saving it all you need to do is fire up FFmpeg and run the following command:

ffmpeg -i PlV8WJ6N3nU.flv -ab 32 -ar 22050 -b 256 -s 320×240 youtube.mpg

Let the encoding begin:

You can feel free to tweak the values I’ve specified for each of the parameters depending on your desired audio/video quality. The values listed above are ones that I’ve found to deliver a QuickTime video near the same quality as the original. Let me briefly describe the params:

-i input file name
-ab set audio bitrate (in kbit/s)
-ar set audio sampling rate (in Hz)
-b set video bitrate (in kbit/s)
-s set frame size (WxH or abbreviation)
and the last, of course, is the output file name. After encoding the resulting QuickTime file as about 7MB. Now all you need to do is fire up your QuickTime player and watch the vid:

It shouldn’t take much effort to encode your video to other formats as well.  Since I wanted to watch videos on my Mac I decided to go with QuickTime.  This process is fairly straight forward and feel free to drop me a comment if you have any problems.

One again: I’m not suggesting this is something you should do.  This was a proof of concept to demonstrate the power of FFmpeg and what better place to grab an FLV file then from YouTube.  Enjoy.

This post is LONG overdue. I’ve been playing FFmpeg for a long time now and through trial and error, along with this page, figured out how to extract a JPG frame from a video at a specific time. A reader recently posted a question asking how to get this done and I hope he doesn’t mind me posting a frame grab here:

This came from a Windows Media file and was grabbed using the following command:

ffmpeg -i n.wmv -ss 00:00:20 -t 00:00:1 -s 320×240 -r 1 -f singlejpeg myframe.jpg

If you haven’t seen FFmpeg’s overwhelming parameter list then beware. This might look like a complicated command, but given FFmpeg has over 100 parameters this really isn’t much. Here’s what the parameters mean:

-i input file name
-ss set the start time offset
-t set the recording time
-s set frame size (WxH or abbreviation)
-r set frame rate (Hz value, fraction or abbreviation)
-f force format

The last paramter is actually the output file name. I can’t tell you how excited I am to finally get this working. If you have any problems with the command above then please be sure to contact me.