Video Breakthroughs

If you’ve ever wanted to create a streaming video site or add a video to server side, then you must have heard of FFMpeg and MEncoder. They are both famous open source projects and easy to get. Anyone can get these scripts at zero cost. However, some webmasters don’t want to be tied to a GPL or LGPL. So they try to find other server-side encoding solutions.

These solutions are called as FFMpeg MEncoder alternatives or adobe flash media server alternatives, and most of these alternatives are commercial projects. I used to join in a video site creation work and have made lots of preparation work. Except for the known FFMpeg and MEncoder, I also searched some commercial projects and YouTube clones. For me, my budget is limited, so I choose affordable top one rank product in Google (the search term is “server-side video converter”). This commercial project is Sothink video encoder engine from SourceTec software. For the request of some friends, I process the experience into an article and make some comparisons of these three projects, which helps those people who want to create streaming video sites or add videos to server side choose the appropriate projects.

What you can do with FFMBC:

* Import your files in Final Cut Pro or AVID Media Composer by:

- Creating XDCAM HD422 files in .mov or .mxf

- Creating XDCAM IMX/D-10 files in .mov or .mxf

- Creating AVID DNxHD files in .mov

* Transcode your MPEG-2 4:2:2 Tranport Stream files containing S302M audio.

* Transcode your AVCHD files correctly.

* Merge and split your audio tracks.

* Create Quicktime files containing timecode tracks.

* Create audio files (mp3 and m4a) with cover art.

* Keep covert art when converting your audio files.

* Faststart MP4 for streaming (replace header in front) automatically.

FFmbc-0.7 BETA is synced on FFmpeg git 7cbb856efe6ccab7485bb96ad3887472a6519ffa

Sample use cases cmdline here : http://bit.ly/pq0VqJ

FFMPEG supports MXF, but apparently not the packaged MXF files that are stored on the P2 cards. There is a handy C++ library and accompanying tools from www.freemxf.org, that can do a handful of operations on MXF files.

New major release:

- Live HDS muxer

- string validation in ffprobe

- support for decoding through VDPAU in ffmpeg (the -hwaccel option)

- stereoscopic 3d metadata handling

- WebP encoding via libwebp

- ATRAC3+ decoder

- OpenGL device

- Support DNx444

- libx265 encoder

[...]

While we have been looking towards an FFmpeg 1.0 release for nearly one year, the version 1.0 release of the popular FFmpeg library was finally tagged after being in development for more than one decade.

The initial release of this open-source multi-media library came in December of 2000, but only now twelve years later has it hit the over-emphasized 1.0 milestone. Michael Niedermayer, the official FFmpeg maintainer since 2004, mentioned on the developers list that he uploaded the 1.0 release. However, he's not updating the FFmpeg main page until after he's got "a bit of sleep", so the official announcement is likely still a couple of hours out.

As far as what's new to FFmpeg 1.0, the change-log is available from Git. The official FFmpeg 1.0 changes include:

- RTMPT/RTMPS/RTMPTS/RTMPE/RTMPTE protocols support

- 3GPP Timed Text encoder/decoder

- MP2 encoding via TwoLAME

- Smooth Streaming live segmenter muxer
- F4V muxer

[...]

This fifth articles wants to add more advanced use cases and usage to what was presented and discussed in the previous 4 parts. This article will be enriched in the next weeks and months to include even more advanced examples and use cases that can be solved with a smart use of FFmpeg. Good reading!

Summary :

1. Optimize multi-pass multi-bitrates encoding

2. AAC encoding

3. Joining video

4. Use an HLS stream as source

5. Generate a HLS stream using FFmpeg ? Not yet

6. Record a stream endlessly rotating target file

- Video Size and Aspect Ratios

- Frame Rates

- FFmpeg Encoding : X264, DV Video, Audio

- Eac3To

- Other FFmpeg Options

This is the fourth and last part of a short series dedicated to FFmpeg.

In this conclusive article I will focus on the support for RTMP that makes FFmpeg an excellent tool for enhancing the capabilities of the Adobe Flash Streaming Ecosystem. FFmpeg introduced a strong support for RTMP streaming with the release 0.5 by the inclusion of the librtmp (rtmpdump) core. An RTMP stream can be used both as an input and/or as an output in a command line.

Using some of the parameters that we have seen in the first three parts of the series, it’s possible to do a lot of things that the standard Flash Streaming Ecosystem cannot offer. Sometimes there are minor bugs but generally speaking the rtmplib works well and helps FMS to fill the gap with some advanced feature of Wowza Server (like re-purposing of rtp/rtsp stream, TS-stream and so on).