Starting Your Business on Linux In 2009 - Building Your Own Video Sharing Site

Even thought the authorities and business leaders are pessimistic for the economy of 2009 because of the well-known financial crisis, when talk about FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and Linux, they always feel comforted and delighted.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, sees Linux and the FOSS ecosystem surrounding it as having insurmountable advantages in any market over its main competitor Windows — advantages that an economic downturn only intensifies. At a time when a search for the lowest possible price point is happening in such areas as notebooks, FOSS is available at no cost. It is easy to rebrand and customize in a way that Windows Isn’t, and is also technically more efficient. “Lower cost, faster time to market, higher profit margins, better branding — these are all things that are in favor of Linux and not in favor of Windows”, he summarizes.

From the above point of view, we can see the encouraging outlook of Linux in the year 2009. For you, maybe it is a new business opportunity. Please consider about starting your business on Linux from building a video sharing site just like YouTube.

Here I introduce you a professional but low-cost tool - Video Encoder Engine for Adobe Flash (Linux Version), which provides a complete and creative video hosting solution for video uploading and sharing. This video encoder for Linux can convert almost all popular formats of video to FLV format. You can do advanced video editing, batch conversion, quality control and other tasks with CGI or any other server-side scripting languages.

More details: http://www.flvsdk.com/flv-encoder-command-line/index.html

Sothink Comes Educational Video Sharing Solution for YouTube Clone Sites!

Nowadays more and more schools and colleges worked on building their own video sharing websites to share education videos and one of their choices is the solution called Sothink Video Encoder Engine for Adobe Flash (Windows Version) - video sharing software.

That means the academia, or the educational services have the same choice as the most popular video sharing websites—choosing Flash format to share video online.

Why?

“Although Flash may not offer the same quality as some of the other formats, it can deliver streaming video content without worrying about players and operating systems”, said YouTube operator.

Almost every machine in the world has the Flash player and Flash in the long run is going to be the preferential media. So, the builders of YouTube clone sites also choose to share Flash videos. As for schools and colleges, surely Flash is the best and simple enough choice for them to build video sharing sites.

Nowadays, besides on computers, students also would like to watch and listen to lectures on PDAs, iPods, iTunes or in MP3. It is great if schools and colleges could build their own video sharing website to share the educational videos. And it is really needed such a video sharing website for learning, sharing and communication

Then, a powerful and easy-to-use video sharing software is needed.

Sothink Video Encoder Engine for Adobe Flash (Windows Version) provides users a complete and creative video sharing solution for video uploading and sharing, especially a perfect solution for building a education video sharing site just like many popular video sharing websites. It does best to meet schools and colleges’ video hosting needs and can be applied to web servers, blogs, forums and other interactive areas.

Create video hosting server easy. Know how.

YouTube-like video hosting web-sites take high enough rating positions in the Internet. Sophisticated process do you think is the developing of such video services and web-sites?
No. It is easier than it seems to be. Ok, let create our own video hosting web-site. I am going to demonstrate the easiness of it using Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash. All we need is a web-shell. And Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash will undertake the creation of thumbnails and converting of video clips from avi, mpeg, mpg, mpe, dat (VCD), vob (DVD), wmv, asf, asx, mp4, mov, 3gp, 3g2, 3gpp, dv, qt, rm, rmvb formats into flash flv format.

Easiest way to convert video on server-side on-the-fly.

Install it easy

At the first we should choose an operating system our server will run under. It could be any Windows- or Linux-based platform with preinstalled set of web-server. We will use Apache2 + PHP + MySQL.

You can find PHP, ASP, and ASP.NET server settings samples in Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash documentation, therefore, in order to avoid repeating, we will explain the main point of encoder’s operation.
A user upload video file on the server using browser form.
As soon as the video file had appeared on the server, we make an order Sothink Video Encoder to convert it and the encoder converts the file into flv-format.
And then end-user can play this flv-file on a separate public web-page using special swf-player.

A lot of examples of code.

Additionally there is a function of watermark application on video and on-the-fly creation of video clip thumbnail to add it in video file gallery.

During testing of Sothink Video Encoder on PHP we created a files uploading form, then moved our video file in “tmp” directory and made order Sothink Video Encoder to process the uploaded file and move the converted file into a directory “movies“.

The command looked like:
fvec tmp/source.avi movies/result1.flv -vw 320 -vh 240 -tn thumbs/thumb1.jpg -tw 160 -th 120

The FVEC has converted AVI into FLV, has changed video frame size into 320×240 and has created a thumbnail. The encoder has dropped the thumbnail in the directory “thumbs”, and ready-for-view flash video file – into the directory “movies“.

In fact, we needed just only install the shell and define the directories for results.

Additional command settings allow:
- to manage outcome audio and video settings
- to get various income file information
- and other
The program settings are flexible.

E.M. Total Video Converter Command Line 2.20

E.M. Total Video Converter Command Line offers a console solution for video conversion on Windows and Linux (via Wine) . You can use it for conversion between most video formats (such as FLV, SWF, AVI, WMV, MP4, 3GP, MPG, MOV, MP3, DV, AAC and so on), it also can convert video for your mobile video player (such as PSP, PS3, iPod, iPhone and etc.) easily. Functions of video resizing, combining, trimming are also the advantages belonging to it.

Command Line Flash 8 FLV Encoding

I have been searching for a command line Flash 8 (VP6) FLV video creation tool for a long time. I've bought On2's Flix Pro - but even though it is a mile better than Sorenson's horrible Squeeze, it still had some serious issues with AviSynth input for instance. In general it was good for one-at-the time encoding, but batch processing was tedious and buggy.

So for a while I had actually went back to Flash 6, and batch encoding via ffmpeg's built-in FLV-encoder. While browsing for some info on VP6, I found an ffmpeg patch, that allowed for VP6 AVI to FLV muxing. Even though it's a few months old, it hadn't been included in ffmpeg, so I merged it myself, and after learning how to build ffmpeg, I got a working version. Here are the tools you need:

ffmpeg win32 binary including VP6 FLV mux patch.
Toolpack with example avs and bat.

You also need: Avisynth 2.5.6 or later, and last but not least the On2 VP6.2 VFW codec. The On2 codec is free for personal use, but for some strange reasion it is no longer offerered at On2's website. For commercial use, you should be (morally) ok, if you just buy Flix Pro.

Short how-to:

1. Install AviSynth.
2. Install VP6.2 codec.
3. Unpack ffmpeg and the toolpack from above in the same directory.
4. Put an AVI file called "example.avi" (that is readable by AviSynth) into the directory with ffmpeg.
   
5. Run "example.bat".
6. Wait.
7. You should (with a bit of luck) have an "example.flv" by the time the bat file finishes.

You can use the excellent FLV Player by Martijn de Visser to watch your result offline, or use Jeroen Wijering's great Flash Video Player and put your result online.

Customization.

The important part of video encoding is of course customization. There are three main points. The AviSynth script providing the input - the video encoding parameters and the audio encoding parameters. I will cover how you can modify these settings, as there are many good guides on what settings to use for good quality.

Video to FLV command line

Flash Video MX SDK V2 is placed on the shelf for the on-demand solution to convert video to Flash under COM environment and Flash Video MX SDK V2 environment.

Videos and audios in AVI, WMV, MOV, FLV, MP4, H.264,MPEG, MPG, VOB, 3GP, 3G2, DVD, DV, MP3, WMA, MP3, etc. are all supported, and On2 VP6, H.263 video codecs are within reach too. The leaps of functions like: thumbnail capture, video resizing, trimming, and one processor locking (for dual-processor) will exceed your expectation in integrating this EXE or DLL SDK to desk-top programs or web servers.

VP6 FLV Commandline Encoding Tool

Hi!

I just finished something that might be helpful for you - a way to convert from AviSynth to a VP6 FLV using only free command-line tools.

I wrote the instructions and put up the tools needed at:
http://flvsdk.blogspot.com/

Basicly you make a VP6.2 AVI, and convert it to FLV using a patched ffmpeg.

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