I'm not building the next YouTube or iTunes, but I do need to give my users the ability to upload their videos and audios -- then present it on the web at the highest possible quality with the lowest possible file size.
Questions:
FOR INPUT: What video and audio formats should I support? I'm guessing I should try to support the most common formats, but I'm not entirely sure what they are. Also, I'm not sure if I should support the most common formats. Maybe there is a reason not to support a certain format.
FOR OUTPUT: What video and audio output formats should I generate? I'd like to use HTML5's and tags, but know I should consider supporting non-HTML5 browsers. Should I do OGG, MP4 and FLV for videos? What about audios?
Given an unknown video and audio file uploaded by the user, what command should I use to generate the desired output formats. I'd like one command to convert to particular outputs -- and hopefully not have to do anything different to the commands depending on the input (it'll be a pain for me to know what the MIME type is of the file, etc. and can't really do an "if input is a WMV, then run this command" logic).
Suggestion FFMPEG experts?
Support what you actually support. Build FFmpeg with support for as many formats as feasible, and then instead of giving users a list of supported formats just report if FFmpeg choked on their file. Users can (barely) tell what the container format is, and that's not enough information for you to know if you can transcode it correctly.
Use h264 video in an mp4 container, and aac audio in an m4a container. Since the videos are going to be played online, there's no reason to support many formats if one will do. HTML5 and Flash can both play those formats, so don't give yourself extra problems by having numerous output formats apart from the myriad input formats you'll get.
ffmpeg -i <input video file> -c:v libx264 -c:a libfaac output.mp4. Of course that's just a start, and you might well want to adjust the quality (-qscale), bitrate (-b), etc. You'll have to tune the parameters somewhat to fit your needs, sadly there is no single configuration for "highest possible quality with the lowest possible file size."
Related
I know this kind of problem was already mentioned, but, I have to play some videos who are encoded in MP4 (h264 / AAC). Some of them are 2 hours long, sometimes more.
The problem is that they don't start quickly, because I need to download a random amount of data to be able to play the video : the browser doesn't load the entire file, but 5/6MB, which is a problem for the lowest connexions.
I tried the FFMpeg option -movflags +faststart but it changes nothing.
I tried the qt-faststart tool, it says "last atom in file was not a moov atom".
The server seems to be configurated to allow partial requests (Accept-Ranges:bytes in Response Headers).
Did I tried everything? Is there something more I can do?
Thanks !
Romain
You need to look into adaptive streaming. Either HLS or DASH format would solve your problem. It does entail to review your media delivery architecture and your video player.
Example here: https://www.keycdn.com/support/how-to-convert-mp4-to-hls/
Players like JW Player can read both format on most platforms.
I wanted to write a little website which provides quite long audio playbacks.
Because I have a very limited webspace I wanted to compress the .wav files I have with the tool wavpack. The compression works pretty good and the vlc media player is able to play the file but used within a website via the audio tag it does not work. I noticed that windows is not able to display the bitrate nor the length of the audio file in its detail page maybe this is an indicator that the file is not properly converted/compressed?
Does someone know if the current browser support wavpack, what the correct MIME type would be or if there is another lossless compression for .wav files.
Thank you all in advance.
Unfortunately, there is no MIME type for WavPack (see here and there).
But that's probably not a problem! Actually, in the default mode, WavPack only compacts your WAV files. As mentioned on their website (emphasis mine):
In the default lossless mode WavPack acts just like a WinZip compressor for audio files. However, unlike MP3 or WMA encoding which can affect the sound quality, not a single bit of the original information is lost…
So, if you use the default mode:
you gain a bit of disk space/bandwidth compared to the original audio
you don't lose any quality
For the purpose of a website, you would be better off encoding your files to a lossy format (AAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, etc.) which will give you a real compression gain.
In the end, you have two solutions:
You don't care about bandwidth / You care about quality: Use pure WAV files
You care about bandwidth / You care less about quality: Use AAC or Ogg Vorbis
Is there any way to stream mkv files on webpage using javascript/html or any other technologies? I found many questions about this, but I really want to know the answer - is this possible in any way? Maybe ajax, javascript, php, html? Maybe some external libraries? Anything?
I was wondering how youtube works. Is there possible to upload mkv file? Is so, how that videos are streaming to end user?
I know that browser doesn't support mkv natively, but maybe is some way to forcing html to do that?
Any help will be appreciated.
YouTube most probably works using the DASH protocol format. On the server side, the source audio and source video are separately divided into segments of different bitrate/quality. A manifest keeps an index of all possible segments values and their location. This allows to switch quality during playback in the player.
On the client side, the DASH (should be the same with the other main technology: HLS) manifest is used by the player to locate the segments to load in order to feed the content in two separate SourceBuffer, one for audio and one for video and both are being played synchronously together in the MediaSource. For an example player that handles this, see the Shaka Player developed by Google.
Conclusion, there is no need to use a container like mkv but each channel (video, audio) needs to point to a browser supported codec encoded segments.
You don't need anything special for streaming pre-recorded media files. A normal HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 server will work just fine. The browser is generally capable of seeking into the file using range requests.
Matroska (MKV) is a container format, and it actually is widely supported because it's basically the same as WebM. WebM is a subset of Matroska... the key differences being that there are suggested codecs for use. (Matroska itself supports almost anything.)
Your audio and video tracks in the file can use a variety of codecs... the key is to use codecs compatible with browsers. Opus for audio and VP8 for video will take you far.
From there, simply reference your video file in a <video> tag.
Hello :)
I need to be able to display any popular video format (MKV, FLV, MP4,...) inside a browser WHILE converting. To do this I've turned to FFMPEG to convert any video to .ovg and spent hours on Google, forums and in documentation but I can't find a way to play the converted video real-time.
Does anyone know how you can play a video in HTML while FFMPEG is still converting it?
You can't use a single format, especially if you want your videos played on iOS. HLS is a good compromise but you'll need a player on desktop browsers. You can find HTML5/Media Source Extension (MSE) solutions like hls.js
With ffmpeg you can generate a HLS EVENT playlist which is something like a combination of live and VOD: media segments are appended to the playlist as they get converted and when the input ends it remains available as VOD. It can be served via HTTP with any web server.
ffmpeg -i <input> [...] -f hls -hls_playlist_type event /path/to/html/dir/playlist.m3u8
ffmpeg supports multiple outputs and you can convert the video to other formats at the same time if you want:
ffmpeg -i <input> [...] -f hls -hls_playlist_type event /path/to/html/dir/playlist.m3u8 \
[...] -f <format2> <output2>
I am creating a video portfolio website with a large quantity of videos and I am wondering as to the best way to go about encoding the videos for web playback. I am using the html5 video for everybody methodology, so I need the video encoded in the following 3 formats:
h.264
Ogg
WebM
I don't necissarily NEED WebM, but it would be nice.
Up until now I've been using a combination of Handbrake and ffmpeg2theora, but I am looking for some sort of all in one solution, as Handbrake seems to have trouble with large sized videos, and ffmpeg2theora is just a pain in the ass. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks!
Miro Video Converter works really well for all those formats.
It's essentially a wrapper UI for ffmpeg and has limited options but does a good job.
You can also display the ffmpeg command log and tweak the command if the default output doesn't satisfy you.
It's also free.
You might want to take a look at VLC's conversion functionality. It can export in a number of different formats using export plug-ins, and has a handy encoding queue as well. As of right now I know it can do H.264 as well as Theora ... I'm not sure about WebM ... my version doesn't, but there may be an encoding plug-in coming that will do that as well.
Best of all, VLC is free.
Hope this helps,
Jason
FYI I tried Miro, and ran into some odd conversion issues. My .ogg files were fine, but my .webm files were a bit wonky. They'd play/run fine locally, but I'd get an error with the file when I uploaded it to my server (it would play once, and then hang every time thereafter).
I had some luck with Firefogg, which I ended up using without problems.
However, both Miro and Firefogg are more of a one file, click, convert approach. If you're wanting to do a large batch, here's a guide that a friend sent to me, from Brett Terpstra: Automating HTML5 Video Encodes. It's way over my head... but perhaps of some use to you.