Lewies Blog

I have a very small collection of videos that I recorded through AudioBlogs. When I tried to retrieve the videos, I found that they were all in a format called Flash Video. They all had an extension of FLV. I didn’t know how to view these files.

After searching the internet, I came accross a few players that were free and open-source. I took a liking to one called Flash Video Player. It was easy to install. I just dropped an SWF shockwave flash file onto my website and made a reference to it. I saw my videos play in no time at all.

For most of us, our FLV files will probably be missing some metadata due to an earlier bug with many programs that converted other video formats to FLV. AudioBlogs is no exception. Because my video didn’t have any metadata, the Flash Video Player didn’t know how long the videos were. It would not show the progress of how much video I have watched.

Fortunately, I found an FLV MetaData Injector (free of course). After downloading the files necessary, I pointed the program at a directory full of FLV files and let it go to work. It didn’t take long and after uploading the modified files to my website, I saw that I now had progress bars being displayed with the videos.

Do you already have a few videos in a different format? You may want to consider converting them to FLV format. Statistics show that there are more users who can view flash files then those that can play AVI files. There is free software called Riva FLV Encoder to help you convert your AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, and WMV files to FLV. Good luck in finding something to convert them from FLV to another format.

Last is WordPress. There are a few WordPress plugins going around that let you show off your FLV files. Unfortunately, I have not gotten this far yet. I will do it soon, but I had to at least get this much information out for one of my loyal readers. At the moment, I have a small PHP script that lists all of my FLV files within a specified directory and shows them off when you click them.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 14th, 2005 at 12:11 am and is filed under Blogging, Hobbies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.