The first step in building my YouTube clone is making sure all the programs on the server work. If you remember from yesterday, I’m using FFmpeg and JW FLV Player.
Here are some great instructions for installing FFmpeg on a Linux server. Unfortunately my Google-foo was not so strong this morning and I ended up playing around for a while before I found that page. The real trick is making sure you have LAME installed before you compile FFmpeg.
After that, converting a video from QuickTime to FLV is a simple command like this:
ffmpeg -i movie.mov -ar 22050 movie.flv
The -ar option sets the audio rate on the FLV file. Flash movies are very particular about audio bit rate. It must be either 44,100, 22,050, or 11,025. FFmpeg is smart enough to resample the audio track. Depending on the format of your original file, you might also need to specify the audio codec with -acodec mp3.
The JW FLV Player comes with a sample HTML file. It was a simple matter to replace their Flash movie with mine in the HTML and adjust the parameters so it would be the right size on the page.
So far everything has been pretty painless. Tomorrow things will get more interesting when I start trying to fully automate this process.
Wow, progress. Writing something publicly seems to motivate me.
I made it most of the way through getting my wp theme created and made an error so I am going through three pages of stuff trying to figure out where the typo is so I can move on to the fun part – the css.
Cheers!
Exactly. If I just think about doing something, it’ll never happen. But if I shout it from the roof tops, that motivates me a little more.
Sorry the themes are giving you such fits. Maybe one of these days I’ll get caught up and be able to help. Of course, you’ll have it figured out by then…
My secret plan is to create a theme for you for this vanilla blog…that will be my payment for using you as a security blanket – I can tell you I’m having trouble and then for some weirdo reason it becomes a matter of immense pride if I can figure it out myself before you have a chance to bail me out. I’m sure a therapist would have a great time with that admission – whatever…