Et voila! (if everything works, as it did for me)

If you run into an issue where “libraries can’t be found”, you are probably missing the zlib library. I have posted a defect for this here.

Since I’ve seen nothing which addresses the processing delays that I noticed in ffmpeg when generating thumbnail images, I figured I should share some important optimizations. I used to specify this command line when generating the images from a movie source (f4v in this case):

ffmpeg -y -i mymovie.f4v -an -ss 00:05:00 -t 00:00:00.01 -sameq -r 1 -vframes 1 -deinterlace -f mjpeg mythumbnail.jpg

This will take about one minute to generate the image of the video frame which is five seconds into the clip. This seems really extreme and is even worse when you try to increase the start location; for instance 45 seconds in, takes about an hour.
So, I knew there had to be a better way and I monkeyed around with the options:

ffmpeg -y -ss 00:05:00 -i mymovie.f4v -an -t 00:00:00.01 -sameq -r 1 -vframes 1 -deinterlace -f mjpeg mythumbnail.jpg

There is only one change between these lines, the placement of the “ss” option. This change causes the command to complete in less than a second, no matter what our start time is. Quite an increase in processing for something so simple! I hope this helps a few of you out there.

Robert and Art continue to amaze me with their Xuggler project. If you are like me and have had to use FFMPEG in a project (Java in my case), you know how hard it can be to get everything working correctly. Xuggler has some how made this even more easy than with their 1.0 version. Through the use of their MediaTool you can do some incredible stuff; the stuff that should have been possible with JMF! Do yourself a favor and check out their post about the MediaTool.

As a minor side note, Xuggler has changed its license to AGPL with the 3.0 release.

Having been in the media streaming game for quite some time, esentially since its birth on the internet. I have needed conversion and transcoding tools countless times. These tools usually needed to interoperate with Java in one way or another. I have used the various offerings throughout the years, from JMF, FMJ, QuickTime, and helloNetwork stuff to accomplish my tasks. None of these tools worked as seemlessly nor flawlessly as Xuggler does. One of the best things about it, is that it works with Red5 for live transcoding! 

Another key point to consider is that it works everywhere (osx, linux, and win); this is an important feature when I consider tools. So are you ready to buy a copy now? Guess what, it gets better.. Xuggler is FREE and it can be built compliant to GPL or LGPL!

Kudos go to Art and Robert, you’ve created an awesome open source tool and I am glad to use it.

http://blog.xuggle.com/

Lastly, if youre attending FITC in Amsterdam next week you should stop and see Arts demo.