Hi.

I am wondering if there's a simple way of converting FLV (flash) files into other formats such as AVI, MOV (QuickTime) or even WMV? I can watch FLV files natively using Kaffeine, but the quality stinks. Besides, fast-forwarding or rewinding them will almost always cause them to act up. I'd like to avoid that problem.

TIA,
Dai

MOV, AVI and WMV formats are to be avoided equally with FLV. Note - FLV is a container format which normally contains mpeg for video and mp3 for audio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Video

For best results with gnu/linux, use Xiph.org formats ... ogg container with theora video and vorbis audio (will also support speex - speech - and FLAC - lossless audio).

http://www.playogg.org

You can easily convert FLV files which do not use DRM with a utility called ffmpeg2theora, which is available from your yum repos.

For that matter, AVI is also a container format. But it's so old and commonplace now that just about everything supports it, and I don't think it's patent-encumbered, so it's not a big deal to use it. It's only the codecs inside that can be the problem.

They say that pretty much the best quality-for-filesize video codec is x264 (mpeg4). x264 is free, but the mpeg4 standard may have some patent encumbrances. xvid is also pretty good, but it uses an older version of the mpeg4 standard and doesn't give as good a compression rate. It's well supported across platforms though. If you want to go completely free, ogg theora is probably your best bet.

BTW, the avi container doesn't support mpeg4 very well. There's a lack of b-frame support (although it can be hacked around, it's nonstandard and thus not supported everywhere). The ogg container can hold mpeg4, I believe, as can the Matroska container (probably the most advanced and flexible container format out there). And of course mpeg4 has it's own container as well.

Finally, if you're thinking of converting an FLV file to another format in order to improve the quality, just stop right there. The quality of any video can never be better than that of the source it's encoded from. If the source file is already low-quality, then converting it is certainly not going to improve things. It might help with fast-forwarding/scanning problems though, since that is dependent on the formats used.

1 members found this post helpful.

You can try avidemux, or if you want to use ffmpeg, run it first on a file to get some info on it:

Thanks for the info. I just installed and tried ffmpeg2theora. I get the following error (and segfault).

Can you think of any reason for this off the top of your head? The original FLV file can be viewed by Kaffeine.

Thanks again!
Dai

GIYF: googling the error gives stuff like this:
http://readlist.com/lists/mplayerhq....er/1/9948.html

... perhaps you could try specifying the video size explicitly with the -s flag. (man ffmpeg2theora)

If you use the firefox browser, you can try the dwhelper plugin. It will download flash videos and will use either mencoder or ffmpeg to convert them. In Windows, it adds an overlay to the video's unless you purchase the commercial version. In linux it uses ffmpeg or mencoder to convert the videos. The latest version claims to support converting to wmv's but I don't know if this would include the Linux version.

Generally, in Linux you can play wmv9 videos but not encode to that format. You shouldn't want to.
It's a really nasty format.

I don't mind the avi container format. It doesn't support interactive DRM schemes which could be a form of spyware.

You can do this with mencoder.

Depends on how you define simple.

ffmpeg -i SOURCE.FLV -sameq -target ntsc-dvd DESTINATION.MPEG

Which you can put into a dvd with dvdauthor and other tools.

Not that it's really the same quality in that you're probably going from 320x240 (or 160x120) to 720x480. ffmpeg is supposed to just work with -i source.ext destination.ext. But not always functional depending on source and destination formats. And some quality isses if you don't tell it to keep the same quality -sameq. And various options for optimizing to filesize and/or quality. Simple in concept, but can get a bit more complex depending on the standards you're wanting to achieve for your results.

now you guys can use a free flv converter, with which you can convert flv to all kinds of video formats including avi, mov, mpeg, mp4, etc.
http://www.leawo.com/flv-converter/

That program is for windoze only, this is a Linux forum. And it's shareware too, probably malware as well.

I got this script from somewhere on LQ in the past.
It works fine: