What to do with .flv files?

[JoeHill]

On Thu, 23 Nov 2006 02:22:36 -0500
Evan Leibovitch got an infinite number of monkeys to type out:

> > http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/08/22/2121258&tid=39
> >   
> 
> Boy, that was a quick answer... thanks!

Yeah, it was weird, I was meaning to look at that article a coupla days ago,
but never got around to it. As soon as I start reading, your question pops up.
I guess there is something to synchronicity ;-)
 
> FYI, I followed the instructions and it works ... sorta.
> The script mentioned can create DIVX or XVID codec avi files.
> 
> I used the Michael Richards meltdown video from YouTube as my sample.
> 
> Here are the file sizes:
> richards1.flv 6861361 (original file)
> richards1-xvid.avi 10553674
> richards1-divx.avi 11180502
> 
> Even with the larger sizes, the conversion process loses many frames and 
> the video and audio get out of sync pretty quickly.

Dang, I had high hopes... ;-)

Yeah, I've never had much luck with these files, which is why I wanted to read
the article. I usually use Tovid [1], which will convert pretty much *anything*
that even remotely resembles video into NTSC MPEG's. flv's turned out okay, but
as you say, the sound tended to drift out of sync. I usually just end up trying
to find the vid on bittorrent now, if I want it bad enough.

My only suggestions: once you have the .avi's, run tcprobe on them. You'll
probably see that the total frames, fps, and duration, don't 'add up' (see 'man
avisplit'). One thing that has *sometimes* worked for me in the past is to:

transcode -i in.avi -P1 -N 0x1 -y raw -o out.avi

You end up with a much bigger .avi, but I've found in *some* cases this fixes
the audio drift.

If you are a sucker for punishment (I actually did this with a 2 hour movie),
and you really really want a copy of this vid, you can even split the resulting
transcoded avi into small chunks (doesn't have *time* to drift out of sync,
dig?), then use Tovid to convert them all to mpg's, and rejoin them with
the makexml script (part of Tovid)

makexml -group 1.mpg 2.mpg 3.mpg, etc. -endgroup out.xml

This will give you one 'title' which can be burned to DVD. You'll see, if
you're watching closely, the 'joins', but with a youtube vid, I don't think
that will be an issue ;)

Oh why oh why can't everyone just use a standard, open, video format??

[1] http://tovid.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

-- 
JoeHill / RLU #282046
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