Encoding Flash Video in bulk - what is the best tool?
 

Hi,

What is the best tool for automating vid conversions into inline flash video such as youtube and most other video sites do?

Any guidance appreciated,

M

I'd like to know too

double you double you double you dot download dot com

search for flv converter theres heaps of free ones that we use too!

baaaaa!!!

My favorite for video encoding is Sorenson Squeeze. It will handle most any format, including Flash, WMV, Quicktime, MPEG.

If you're doing a ton of encoding, you can set up a dedicated machine on a network, start Sorenson on it, tell it to watch a given folder, and it will watch for and start encoding any video file that shows up in that folder. In that way, you can be cranking away editing your video, and as soon as you've rendered it to the target directory, Sorenson will immediately start encoding without any input from you, and just keep going until everything in the target folder has been encoded.

If you wish, you can configure it to encode multiple versions of the files at different bitrates or image sizes, or you can encode Flash and Windows Media in the same run.

Only thing to be aware of is some versions of Sorenson don't work well with Athlon 64 processors. But Pentium 4 dualcore are better optimized for video processing anyway.

There are less expensive solutions out there, but I believe that the speed, quality, and flexibility of Sorenson makes it, for us anyway, the best choice.

Hope that helps.

Any more suggestions?

squeeze blows.

I could tell you but then there would be more competition in an area thats super hot right now sorry. Google is your friend.

this is unfuckingbelievable...
everybody is buying shitty 3rd party tools ( like swish which sucks badly btw - I made a flash player for a client, his flvs where done in swish and can't be played as external files, had to reencode) but not Macromedia Video Encoder shipped with Flash 8

I would upgrade to Flash 8 -- it's all built in now :thumbsup

oops...beat me to it, flashfreak :winkwink:

key word here is "bulk" :winkwink:

For Windows you may want to consider Cleaner XL.

I'm pretty sure YouTube and Google both use ffmpeg under some Unix variant.

Flash 8 video encoder is limited, cant set it to 1 or 2 passes, cant tweak it like i want to. it does an OK job encoding but not a great job

cleaner xl is SLOW as my grandma and uses the flash 7 codec

flix 8 pro uses the newer on2vp6 codec and is faster than cleaner xl and produces a better video with a smaller file size (ive done 1000k flvs in cleaner and they come out 30% bigger than a 1000k flv in flix)

you can use ffmpeg to encode them on nix/bsd but i have not tested this extensively yet. wayne at techie tells me he is setting this up to do user uploaded content on the fly

i have 12 machines with flix 8 licenses if you need some bulk encoding

Rich

Hire a pro.

man are you sure? really really ?
better shut up, macromedia video encoder has a batch encoding feature too..

i have on2 and i dunno if i just dont know how to use it ... or what ... but takes about 45 min to encode one video .... ims ure some settings can be tweaked

Bump for this informative thread.

interested as well

dont know about that, i usally convert flv to wmv

Really and how many options do you have on the encode? Ive encoded .flv using flash. Id prefer to use Sorenson even with its bugginess.

I second that

on2.com has software you can use but it costs ALOT

i've got a customized server based solution (linux) that converts from any format (avi, mpeg, wmv, etc) to flash. i might be interested in selling. icq me if interested. it's blazing fast on a decent server.

cleaner would probably take a lot longer. flash is quicker (as are some others) but they are 1 pass encoding.

45 mins is nothing, try doing a 3hour dvd at 1000k 640x480 2 pass... 12 hours later...

customized how. ffmpeg will do it on linux and its free

Server side or client side? For what type of use?

There's a great free client side encoder called Super. Converts quickly to FLV.

If you're talking about doing a youtube clone which converts user video into flv's on the fly, then you should look further into the SDK tools which are offered from On2.

These allow you to integrate your own custom code with their VP6 encoder.

This opens up way more possibilities than sitting around batching videos all day yourself with any "out-of-the-box" encoder.

Check it: http://www.on2.com/developer/