Creating MP4 videos ready for HTTP streaming

Question

How can I convert some.flv or some.avi or some.wmv with FFmpeg to be sure that this video will be playable and seekable in JW Player?

Answer 1

This is an answer to last comment by you @abrahab.

You don't need to mp4box a file to be able to pseudo stream it via nginx. The MP4 streaming module takes care of it irrespective of positioning of moov atoms (mp4box shifts the moov atom to beginning of file).

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Now for the 500 server error, are you using "-frag" option with mp4box? MP4 streaming module can't read fragmented MP4 files. Good use of mp4box for pseudo streaming is to interleave the videos for better seeking. Moov atom shifting is an added advantage.

I always do this to mp4box an FFmpeg-encoded file

MP4Box -add MyVideo.mp4 -isma Myvideo-box.mp4

This will also interleave the MP4 file in 500 milliseconds of chunks by default.

Answer 2

Generally, you want to create x264 video within an MP4 container, so the following should be enough. Make sure to replace input name and CRF options. The latter sets the quality, where sane values range from 19 to 25 – lower means better quality, but also higher bitrate:

ffmpeg -i input.avi -c:v libx264 -crf 22 -c:a libfaac output.mp4

You can also use Handbrake for encoding if you like the GUI way.

Now, what you need to do is move the MP4 container's MOOV atom to the beginning. This atom (in essence, a unit of data in the MP4 container) will contains important metadata about the video/audio streams themselves.

If your video is not seekable, then this is probably because the MOOV atom is still at the end of the file and needs to go to the beginning. You can do this with any of the below tools:

• QTIndexSwapper, an Adobe AIR application

• MP4Box, free and open source, running a command similar to the following, where you can change the interval (here, 500):

  mp4box -inter 500 input.mp4

• qt-faststart in Python, which works everywhere where Python is installed.

  qtfaststart input.mp4

That's about it. The rest of the toolchain is actually more complicated than that. You need to properly set up your web server so it handles h.264 content if you want HTTP pseudo-streaming. Check JW Player's documentation for more:

Video Delivery: HTTP Pseudo-Streaming | LongTail Video | Home of the JW Player

You need the h.264 streaming module for Apache, Lighttpd, IIS and NginX and then continue with the JW Player setup. As this is not in the scope of this question and a far broader topic, any problems that might occur during streaming need proper debugging – but the video encoding stage should not matter that much.

Answer 3

You can try this with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg.exe -i "INPUT_FILE.AVI" -threads 2 -s 800x600 -r 25.00 -threads 1 -pix_fmt yuv420p -g 300 -qmin 3 -b 2048k -async 1 -acodec pcm_s16le -ar 22050 -ac 1 -ab 128k -y "OUTPUT_FILE.mp4"