If you have read my previous article on video streaming, you will have noted that most of the popular video broadcasting sites broadcast in Flash flv format.  Of course, there are some freeware on the net which allows you to convert different video formats to flv… but nothing beats server side conversion to SWF format….

I mean.. just take a peek at you tube.  Surely, you dun see them asking you to convert your video to FLV format before uploading to their side?

After some rigorous investigation, I discovered FFMPEG.  Well FFMPEG is another of those really useful software that provides your a command prompt utility to convert files to SWF format.  Basically, all you need to do is to execute a command like:

ffmpeg -i <inputFileName> -o outputFileName.flv

This will very quickly generate out your necessary FLV files.  In fact, upon examining in the issues further, it turns out that quite a few commercial products are just front end implementations of this wonderful video converter.  Why.. they even have a Hall of Shame for such rip offs.  Doesn’t this remind you of my Faisal Shah article?   Hehe…

Then I got stuck… One of the problems with Open Source is that it tends to favour the linux (being an open source Operating System itself) distro.  How was I to get it working on the Windows system?  There were some articles on the net on how we can actually configure and make the binary files.. but surely that is not for a fainted hearted soul like me?  (Of course, the last alternative will be for our linux guru, Edward, to handle it….)

Being a not very technical techy, I was left with my last tool.. Google…

Well, an hour of googling finally did the trick.  Some kind hearted soul actually build the binaries and have it hosted on a site… asking for donations!  Man.. had actually wanted to link him to my blog just to contribute some page rank.. but unfortunately… I just could not find the site again.  It was just too obscure.

Anyway, for those of you who are looking for the FFMPEG Window Binaries, just click here.   It worked for my Windows XP system.  Hope it will do the same for you…. Cheers!