Flash Video On My Web Pages
April 19th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Regular readers of this Journal know that, in the past, I’ve shot short videos with my Canon PowerShot A75 digital camera, and then tried to find a way to display them on a web site.
Specifially, because the Canon shoots its videos in AVI format, I wanted to convert them to smaller Flash videos in Linux and then display them on a charity web site that I created.
In the past, I haven’t had much luck with getting Linux video editing software to do that job, usually either because the Linux video apps that I tried contained way too many complicated configuration settings for digital video beginners like me to figure out how to use to do simple conversions, or because it was even more complicated to try to figure out how to use Linux’s command-line video-conversion tools.
So, in the past, I’ve temporarily booted up my Windows XP hard drive, and used the free Windows Movie Maker software to convert my AVI files into WMV files, and then put hyperlinks to them on my web pages.
Then, my site’s visitors had to click on a hyperlink and wait for the entire video to finish downloading to their computer before their media player would display it.
It’s been almost exactly a year since I tried to put a video on one of my web sites, but two days ago, I shot a short video of a sick friend and I wanted some other friends to be able to view it on one of my web sites.
So, just like I had done about a year ago, I did a Google search, looking for a way to convert the huge AVI file to a smaller, more-universal Flash format.
I’m very happy to report that, this time, I found a post in a support forum in which someone recommended WinFF.
WinFF doesn’t do any video conversions itself. It simply puts a friendly GUI on top of the powerful-but-formidable Linux FFMPEG command. So, instead of having to figure out which long, cryptic FFMPEG command to run, you just click on a few things in WinFF, and WinFF writes the long, cryptic FFMPEG command for you.
I started the Synaptic package manager, found and installed WinFF, and it immediately appeared in my Debian Squeeze (KDE) PC’s Multimedia menu.
It took WinFF only about 20 seconds to convert my 3.9 MB AVI file into a 780 KB FLV file.
Then I downloaded and followed the instructions to upload a couple of files to my web server and add some code to one of my web pages to display the free JW FLV Media Player.
Then, in the JW FLV Media Player’s player’s web page code, I substituted the name of my FLV video for the name of the default video that comes with the player.
I used Kaffeine’s ‘Save Screenshot’ feature to create a preview image of one frame of my video, and substituted its name for the default preview image that is in the media player’s web page code.
When my site’s visitors view that web page, the media player appears and it displays my preview image, along with the ‘play’ button and other controls. When they click on the ‘play’ button, the video immediately starts to play. Nobody has to wait for the whole video to download first because it streams from my web server in real time as it’s playing.
I’m sure that to some people, all of this is just beginner’s knowledge, and it’s not a big deal, but to someone like me who has never done it before, the fact that I can quickly and easily display Flash videos on my web sites opens up a whole new world.
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Tags:
Coding, Consumer Info, Debian, Google, Linux, Software, Video, Web Development, Windows