Using Flowplayer and ffmpeg to Stream Video

We recently had a client that had a need for hosting and streaming videos from their website. These videos were public domain videos, some found on YouTube, NASA’s website, and other resources, and the client was concerned that the videos might be taken down or moved, so they were insistent on hosting the videos on their site. There was also a desire to not require users to have to install Windows Media Player, Quick Time, Flash to be able to view all videos.

Our solution involved using ffmpeg, an application that, among other things, converts audio and video between file formats, to convert all uploaded videos to Flash format, and Flowplayer, an open source Flash player, to stream the converted videos on demand.

This solution involved flagging all uploaded videos as requires_conversion in the database, and a cron script that checks this table, and converts the videos one-by-one. Once available on the public website, Flowplayer takes over and handles displaying the videos to visitors.

Since our application was written in PHP, we also used ffmpeg-php to pull the duration from the videos, and also to generate thumbnails from the video at a random frame.

Some code samples:

Pull Duration

1
2

$oMovie = new ffmpeg_movie( "/path/to/video.flv" );
echo $oMovie->getDuration(); // duration in seconds

Get Thumbnail

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

$oMovie = new ffmpeg_movie( "/path/to/video.flv" );
 
// Grab the middle frame of the movie
$oFrame = $oMovie->getFrame( floor( $oMovie->getFrameCount() / 2 ) );
$oImage = $oFrame->toGDImage();
 
imagepng( $oImage, "/path/to/video.gif" );
imagedestroy( $oImage );