Recording and processing Flash (flv) videos

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Last update : January 30, 2013

Today this contribution has only a historical value.

After YouTube and Google, new players like Metacafe, Blip.tv, Revver, Yahoo Videos and so on have entered the online video sharing space. Today millions of video clips, technology shows, music albums, movie trailers and private films are available on these video sites for online viewing or they can also be downloaded to your hard drive for offline viewing.

The downloaded video files are generally in FLV format (Flash Video) which is an Adobe standard for video compression. It has fast becoming the web standard for delivering online video (replacing Apple QuickTime, AVI, Windows Media and Real rm formats) because Flash Video can be viewed inside Macromedia Flash Players which are shipped by default with most web browsers.

To download Flash Videos, the following approaches are possible:

To record Flash Videos, the following tools are available :

To play Flash Videos on the desktop, use the following players :

To split Flash Videos, use this tool :

To convert and edit Flash Videos, different file conversion programs are available :

  • SUPER from eRightSoft
  • An free online conversion tool (beta) to PC, iPod and PSP is offered by vixy.net.

To encode and publish :

To captionate Flash Videos, the tools available are :

To extract image frames from FLV Videos :

To embed Flash videos in a webpage :

To play Youtube Videos in a webpage :

  • use the Youtube code (an embedded YouTube watermark logo is displayed in the right bottom corner of the player)
  • Mediaplayer by Jeroen Wijering (LongTail Video) ; an embedded YouTube watermark logo is displayed if the standard URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxx is used to respect the terms of service (TOS) of YouTube.  The watermark logo is not shown if  the mp4 url  format http://www.youtubemp4.com/video/xxxxxxx.mp4 is used to play the YouTube videos.

To extract audio data from Flash videos :

Links to tutorials about Flash video processing are given below :