ffmpeg and streaming video

I’ve been interested in trying to stream some of my videos from my server rather than from YouTube. YouTube is great but the video quality is pretty poor.

I’m running CentOS 5.2 and decided to just try installing ffmpeg from rpmforge rather than compiling it. Lazy but easy!

rpmforge is a repository where you can find lots of prebuilt packages that are not part of a standard Redhat/CentOS install. You can find instructions for setting it up here.

So, with rpmforge configured, this was all I needed

Then I looked round for a player to stream the video (which were going to be in flash format). Flowplayer looked pretty nice. I just wanted something simple that would have only the video and controls on the page.

After looking over the sample html pages that come with flowplayer it was easy to create a page with just the video on there. So I uploaded my videos which were in mpg format.

Running the command

converted the video to flash format with a pretty high quality but without making the files too large. I’m sure I could probably find better settings if I played around a bit more.

And here some examples of the end result -

http://sysadminman.net/video/takeoffsywell.html

http://sysadminman.net/video/alconbury.html

http://sysadminman.net/video/fisty_nuts.html

Just out of interest – the aircraft is a Pegasus Quantum 582 which you can see a picture of here.

I no longer own it and and miss the summer evenings flying around the english countryside.

Last updated by matt.

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