Streaming Video

I like to create to movies of family events and post them on my website. I currently use iMovie to import and edit the video and then I attempt to export my video using iMovie and I am having some issues with it being so large.

Any idea's?

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.

What appeared to work pretty good for me is 10 minutes of video equals to about 25Mb of video (which isn't too bad for streaming). To get that I set iMove like such:

If you are seeking the largest audience possible with embedded 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_frames -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_frames=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.

Recommend your mac setup to include this

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

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

2.) Save Movie as moviename.dv format

3.) Open ffmpegx

4.) Click Open and select the moviename.dv

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

6.) Press the Encode button and your done!