Create Streaming Video for Free using Mac OS X

If you have yourself a mac with the newer OS X installed then you can encode streaming video for free and let me show you how I do it.


First, the life saver of an application is ffmpegx. I strongly suggest you go to this website and follow the directions closely to install what it needs to work.


Steps I took to transfer from dv camcorder to flash streaming video for FREE


Import and Edit movie in the free app on mac's called iMovie (super easy)

Save Movie as moviename.dv format

Open the free encoder called ffmpegx

Click Open and select the moviename.dv

Click Save As and select flash format and put the name you would like to save it as

Press the Encode button and your done!

I followed the same princapal for converting a 160mb quicktime (.mov) file to flash. I created the quicktime movie using iPhoto to make the slideshow with some music in the background.


Encoded as:


12 frames per second

approx. 320 x 240

medium quality stereo

200kbps



Here is a web streaming version of the slideshow encoded with the Web Settings in Quicktime which are:


iMovie - Export - Quicktime - Web Streaming will get you these settings in your .mov file


12 frames per second

approx. 320 x 240

medium quality stereo

have "hints" added to improve streaming performance



One guy suggests these settings:


I can definitely verify this for Panther. I've compressed about 100 movies using the following compression schemes:


iMovie: Custom, 300x400, 15fps, Motion JPEG-A codec.

then

QTPro: MP4 Export, 300x400, 15fps


I get a 12GB movie usually down to 800MB with very little loss of video quality, apart from the fps, but the movies are still very watchable.


If you are seeking the largest audience possible with _embed_ded streaming video, Flash video is a good choice, since it is allegedly supported by 98% of all browsers. One can easily create Flash video that can be downloaded progressively with a few open source or other freely available tools. The easiest way to encode the video is with ffmpeg (available through Fink) with something along the lines of:


ffmpeg -i movie.dv -f flv -r 12 -me full -subq 5 -mbd 1 -b 150

-qmin 2 -qmax 31 -s 360x240 -acodec mp3 -ar 11025 -ab 16 -ac 1 video.flv


This will create a Flash video with settings of 12fps, 360 by 240 pixels, 150 video bitrate, and a 16 bitrate mono audio track. Now to make the Flash video support progressive downloading in all the major browsers, we need flvtool2. Once installed, run the following command:


flvtool2 -u video.flv


At this point, all you need is to provide a SWF wrapper for your Flash video. There's a serviceable one here. Download it, expand the archive, and follow the instructions in the readme folder to install and _link_ to your webpage.


Addendum: Using ffmpeg to encode your Flash video will yield quality about on par with what you could get with shareware product such as video2swf. But even better results can be attained with mencoder. The catch is that you have to compile mencoder from source to get it to work -- a venture ill-advised for the unix-challenged.


In any case, with a newly-compiled mencoder, the following command should work:


mencoder input.dv -ofps 12 -o video.flv -of lavf -lavfopts

i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b__frame_s -oac lavc -lavcopts

acodec=mp3:abitrate=32 -srate 22050 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:

vbitrate=100:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3redia=2:dia=2:

vmax_b__frame_s=0:vb_strategy=1recmp=2:cmp=2ubcmp=2reme=2:qns=2

-vop scale=360:240


To get an idea of the sort of quality produced by mencoder, go here. You can create Flash video that will play nice with slow internet connections by changing the abitrate to 8, the srate to 11025, and the vbitrate to 35.