[MEncoder-users] mov to swf, mission impossible?

[Ian Collier]

On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 11:44:25PM +1000, you wrote:
> So... I need to convert .mov tu .swf. It shouldn't be hard. Except I have 
> found absolutely no way.

> at http://www.swftools.org/ they say they've got avi2swf. But unfortunately:
> "AVI2SWF  Converts AVI animation files to SWF. ... (Notice: this tool is 
> not included anymore in the latest version, as ffmpeg or mencoder do a 
> better job nowadays)
>
> They say I can convert avi to swf with mencoder, but that's not true:
>
> http://www.swftools.org/faq.html says:
> "mencoder file.avi -lavfopts 
> i_certify_that_my_video_stream_does_not_use_b_frames \
> -ffourcc FLV1 -oac mp3lame -of lavf -ovc lavc \
> -lavcopts vcodec=flv:acodec=mp3:vbitrate=500:abitrate=56 -srate 22050 \
> -o file.swf"

That FAQ seems to be slightly confused.

SWF is essentially a computer program that's interpreted by the Flash
player in your browser.  The program can embed sounds and movies, but
it's not usual to embed a whole movie.  Instead what the likes of
YouTube do is supply your browser with a movie player written in Flash;
the movie player then downloads and plays an FLV flash movie file.

A previous poster to this list has pointed out that mencoder can in fact
produce a SWF program that embeds your movie if you say "-lavfopts format=swf"
(I didn't know that - learn something new every day).  It works, but it's
not pretty.

Instead you will probably be better off downloading a SWF movie player
and using it to play FLV movies that you have produced.  There's a list
of SWF movie players here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flv#Web-based

I've tried Flowplayer (http://flowplayer.org/) and it's quite easy to
use and works well.

Note that when you encode your movies you'll want to adjust the vbitrate
according to the quality of the result you want.  500 is way too low for
the source material I used (640x480 at 30fps from a digital camera).

imc