Video on Flash doesn’t buffer? Maybe a FLV and MP4 issue

I recently tried Flowplayer a Flash video player released under GNU GPL license. It’s great, since it has a plugin allowing pseudostreaming (it allows buffering from any server) with both FLV and MP4 (H.264 / AC3).

Using avidemux to convert my videos, I had no problem to play FLV files: buffering works as expected, I watch video while buffer is filled. But on MP4, I’ve to wait the video is fully buffered (downloaded entirely).

This is not a Flowplayer issue: this exaustive howto explain that FLV and MP4 files should be properly indexed to works with pseudostreaming.

• For FLV files, you can use Flvtool2, a Ruby gem, available also on apt / synaptic via “apt-get install flvtool2″ (Debian packages, description on rubyforge). Using avidemux, FLV files are ok even if I don’t use Flvtool2, so FLV metadata seems correctly handled by Avidemux. Ready for pseudostreaming!
• For MP4 files, you have to move MP4 metadata (“moov atom”) from the end of the file to the beginning, since Avidemux seems to put it on the very end of the video file. To do this, I’ve used successfully a tool named mp4box (mp4box on videohelp, author website) using MP4Box-0.4.6-dev_20090519 version (win32 binary). Read also MP4box documentation on GPAC, you can also get it on sourceforge.

MP4Box usage example:

MP4Box.exe -add TEST_src.mp4 -new TEST_dst.mp4
IsoMedia import – track ID 1 – Video (size 848 x 480)
IsoMedia import – track ID 2 – Audio (SR 44100 – 2 channels)
Saving TEST_dst.mp4: 0.500 secs Interleaving

See also:

Flowplayer forum posts on same topic:

• Able to play H.264 files without full download?
• no playback until .mp4 is fully loaded

Qt-fastart (FFMpeg alternative), another post

DVD to video sharing under Linux howto

I have some DVD to publish on a popular video sharing service on the web. How to do that on Linux? Here a simple howto to achieve this.

First, get some useful software for this task. To do this you should sometimes add the Debian Multimedia repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main

Where “etch” is your distribution. Then run:

apt-get update

On sudo / superuser shell run:

1. apt-get install avidemux acidrip lame x264 mplayer vorbis-tools dvdbackup
   Avidemux is a simple cut-and-paste non-linear editor and encoding software, acidrip a DVD-to-file ripper. X264 is a video encoder for the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard, lame an MP3 encoder and vorbis-tools contains OGG Vorbis encoders (a libre audio library).
2. If you want to rip directly a DVD, encoding it as you wish without changes (cut and paste) from chapters, then use acidrip. For video use X264, for audio choose MP3 or Ogg Vorbis. (howto ends here)
3. If you want to apply some changes, then first backup your dvd with dvdbackup:
   dvdbackup -i /dev/dvd -o my_destination_directory/ -n myDVDtitle -M
4. Open the first huge .VOB file (eg. VTS_01_1.vob) with avidemux, then choose YES for indexing it
5. Now you can export the whole file or part of it: choose x264 as video codec and Vorbis or Lame (MP3) as audio codec. Leave AVI as Format (or choose another).
6. If you want to extract a portion of the video, move cursor to first frame of the selection and click A (Selection Start). Then go to last frame of the selection and click B (Selection End)
7. Click to File -> Save Video to export the selected portion (read Avidemux wiki to more and detailed options). If files are compatible in width x height you can also use the “Append” function to queue more files generating and exporting a bigger one.

Now you can upload your video to popular online file sharing services. Enjoy!