[FFmpeg-devel] How do I add the starttime and totalduration DOUBLE-type metadata to FLV files?

[Ben Hutchinson]

Google's standard for FLV (as used on older versions of YouTube player and
Google Video player) involves at least 2 additional metadata tags. These
are starttime and totalduration. The value for starttime should be 0, and
totalduration should be equal to the official Adobe Flash Video standard
"duration" metadata tag. But there's a problem. These tags are of type
DOUBLE, not STRING, and FFMPEG only allows the insertion of STRING type
metadata tags, at least from what I've seen.

If this isn't already possible in FFMPEG, please consider this a feature
request for future versions.

FFMPEG developers, please hear my reasoning for this feature. This is
important for making the FLV files work correctly in Google's old video
players. I have a copy of one of those players (the actual SWF file, as
downloaded from an archived copy of a video.google.com webpage on the
Internet Archive Wayback Machine, archive.org).

I've successfully embedded the player in a website I have hosted on my own
PC via the Mongoose web server software. And I've managed to successfully
make it play 2 FLV files. One is directly from the old Google Videos
website (again archived on the Wayback Machine), and the other I got from
converting (via FFMPEG) one of my own video files to the FLV format. The
original Google FLV file works completely without glitches in the webpage
embedded Google Video player. The one I got from converting another video
file to FLV does play but it has issues. These issues are that it says NaN
for both the start and stop times in the player's time display, and also
that I can't seek at all in the video. I can only let the video play
through all the way from beginning to end.

If I could add the DOUBLE-type metadata tags starttime and totalduration, I
would likely have a working FLV file, which would play perfectly in the
Google Video player.