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Last year I put together a video documenting my daughter's first year of life. I created a couple of DVDs several months ago and have been meaning to get around to creating some web friendly versions of the video. In raw format the video is 720x480, 30 frames/sec, 15 minutes long, and right at 3GB. I've been wanting to create an FLV and dump it into a nice Flash video player.
This weekend I was able to run the raw video through FFmpeg and received some pretty astonishing results. When it was all said and done the file size was just shy of 30MB, while the quality was pretty decent. Here's the command along with parameters:
ffmpeg -i ellas_first_year.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 ellas_first_year.flv
Here are the parameters explained:
-i = Input file name
-ar = Audio sampling rate in Hz
-ab = Audio bit rate in kbit/s
-f = format
-s = size
I'm playing around with the video bit rate options and will post what I find to be the optimal settings for the web. Here's a screen of the FLV output:
It's a little pixelated but looks decent when you watch it. There are a ton of settings that can be tweaked and there's definitely room to play with in regards to the file size. 30MB for a 15 minute video is tough to beat. Here's a screen of the same frame rendered in mov format:
The dimensions are a little different with the second video and you can see that the colors are more vivid. I'm not sure if this is an encoding issue or just the nature of Flash vs. the Quicktime player. At any rate, there's a lot of possibilities here and I'm looking forward to more experimentation.
Posted by dennis baldwin at December 4, 2005 09:58 PM