Guest | Media Streaming
What is meant by Flash Videos?
Flash Video has been accepted as the default online video format by many sites. Notable users of it include YouTube, Hulu, VEVO, Yahoo! Video, metacafe, Reuters.com, and many other news providers. Flash Video is viewable on most operating systems via the Adobe Flash Player and web browser plugin or one of several third-party programs.
There are two Flash file extensions (Flash video formats) you could use: .flv and .swf.
- A .flv (Flash Video) file is basically a video stream of images and audio sound. A single FLV stream contains at most one audio stream and at most one video stream. Flash supports uncompressed sound and various compressed formats like MP3 and ADPCM as well as the proprietary Nellymoser audio codec. If you are running a streaming server, this would be a good way to go. The upside of this is that any part of the file may be accessed by the end user at any time without having to wait for it to download. But here again, running a streaming server is expensive.
Converting Videos to .SWF Files
One method for creating FLV streams is converting existing audio and video content with FFmpeg [ffmpeg.sourceforge.net]. FFmpeg is a mature and very excellent software project for converting audio and video from and to various formats. Converting a video can be simply done with ffmpeg -i infile.[avi|mpeg] stream.flv. See our download section to get tools for making FLV files.
A .swf file (also a Macromedia Flash Format file) is a complete audio-video file with scripts and more. This would work best for HTTP (progressive) downloading, also called "psuedo streaming". The video clip will play as soon as a portion of the file is downloaded, but the end user will have to wait to access the latter portions of the file (no fast-forward possible) until the entire file has been completely downloaded. This is what we will be mainly talking about. It's a simple, inexpensive, and easy way to stream your media. .SWF is not an acronym officially, but some have claimed it stands for "ShockWave Flash" or "Small Web Format".
Converting Videos to .SWF Files
To start, you must first convert your .avi or other video file format to .swf format using a movie file conversion utility software. There are many different conversion utilities you can buy, and even a few for free. It all depends on your preference as well as your budget. See the video hosting resources page for some possiblities of freeware and shareware software. When you decide on one, follow its instructions and save (or export) it in .swf format. When the video conversion is complete, you'll have a usable Flash video file to embed into your web page. Visit our download section for free tools.
