Llynix 1 Flash 0

Blood sweat and tears and I finally got it. It was.. to say the least.. an ordeal.

After about a week of playing with every website and every little freeware/shareware/whoknowswhere application to try to get my video, audio and watermarking to happen correctly in flash I finally figured a few things out.

  1. Almost every program out there is based on a program called ffmpeg.
  2. My watermarks and ending blurb were completely seperate from the video/audio and that’s why nothing was working with it
  3. ffmpeg runs great on windows if you hunt around for the binaries, except no modules so no watermarking

So I found a friend with a linux box he was willing to lend me, and I went to work.

Now you have to understand, ffmpeg has zilch documentation on compiling. They don’t offer download links or even source code zipped up. You have to get the source from their development tree directly.

After two days I got it to work. I never did get watermarking to work though, instead I went with drawtext which worked fine.

You should see a bit of tweaking in the next few days, there is a bit prettying up I can do. But the flash should be much easier on you and me.

The Flash Dilemma

I thought it would be easy. My digital camera took quicktime movies, quicktime pro made simple video editing a snap. I even managed to add a watermark and a blurb at the end. I thought, I’ll upload it to youtube and use their handy embed feature.

So I upload away, and in a few minutes it’s up. A few more minutes it’s processed. I view it in all it’s splendid glory.

Except the audio is way out of sync. On a 10 second clip you can catch it at the end. In a 30 second clip halfway through it looks like I’m an air guitar god.

And my watermarks are gone. So is the blurb at the end.

I tried every other site out there I swear. Some got the audio/video dead on, only one saved the watermark and it reversed the colors. The audio was out of sync on that site as well.

Obviously it was going to be more difficult then I expected. So I started looking into encoding into a different format. Yet everything I downloaded had the same problem.

Apparently the quicktime format allows multiple video files. My watermarks and blurb weren’t part of my video, they were seperate. When I went to encode the encoder was ignoring my extras.

So I’m stuck at this point with the problem of watermarking video. If I can solve that I can easily covert everything to flash on the site and save bandwidth and probably be a lot easier on the two visitors I have.