Current Project(s)

I have began a project of transcoding my music video collection into SWF (Shockwave Flash). Thinking this was going to be relatively easy, I researched a few places and came up fairly empty. So, this now seems to be an enormous undertaking.

My thinking is this:

• since I have about 300 or so music video files in AVI, MPG, and MOV formats, I’ve always just burned them to DVD whenever I want to watch them away from the computer. This is a cumbersome thing when you consider that, on average, only about a dozen or so music videos will fit onto one DVD disc (plus menus and DVD overhead).
• I don’t really look forward to carrying around so many DVDs on the odd chance that I want to watch a few videos from a computer, or the fact that whatever computer I’m using might not even have a DVD drive.
• I don’t really want to spend the time and energy involved in uploading this massive collection onto a service like YouTube, etc. not to mention the entire set of DRM/copyright issues.

I was initially under the impression that the current state of CMS (content management systems) like Joomla/Mambo or even Xoops or Drupal would give me the ability to simply scan a directory (or upload a video) and have it instantly available to me on a webpage a la Google Videos or YouTube.com-style. This doesn’t seem to be the case. There is hardly anything out there for the hobbyist that enables someone to have a video collection. I suppose everyone just uploads their videos onto those services and tolerates the loss of customization and control.

Current Linux tools seem to be able to handle this type of need. ffmpeg will transcode just about any type of video into FLV (Flash), though that’s it — you get a Flash-encoded video, with no real way to view it even if you have a Flash plugin in your web browser — you still need a player. Of course, there are quite a few Flash players out there, but then you still have to embed the player into your website and then toss FLV videos at it in order for you to see anything.

There seems to be a large gap in pre-made web applications that do this well. One candidate is PIVIA. However, getting this thing to work in an automatic way has been rough at best. It doesn’t seem to want to encode videos on the fly like it claims to do. My workaround is to manually transcode videos, but I have over 300 of them and that could take a while… Also, using PIVIA, the filenames have to be mangled in such a way that the format, tags, and any meta-information are written into the filename, but most of that information is then written into a database. I’m not convinced this thing was written efficiently, but it seems the author didn’t really design it to do video but photos instead. I’m sure it does photos VERY well, but that isn’t what I need it for — and there are hundreds of other photo gallery applications out there to choose from.

Having said all this, I’m not even going to touch on the fact that I’m also downloading TV shows via RSS/Bittorrent as I posted about before. It would be REALLY nice to view those shows whenever/wherever, but alas I’ll probably still be transcoding videos until/when someone makes a major breakthrough in hosting video for the home-hobbyist.

[Ed. It seems that I already have all the tools necessary to make some sort of automated video file processor with a web-y frontend.

• ffmpeg transcodes video.
• flvtool2 will add meta tags so that you can skip to parts of a video before it has fully downloaded.
• PHP, for scripting the process on the web server.
• Apache, a web server.
• There's also a free FLV player than can be embedded into a web page.

All I need now is the time to toss it all together in some sort of sensible way.]