Coding4Fun

Converting YouTube Videos Using ffmpeg

We now have the video on our hard drive in the Flash (FLV) format, and although we could build a simple HTML page to embed the Flash videos to watch them locally, what we really want to do is convert the video from FLV format to WMV (Zune) or MP4 (iTunes) format. To do that, we'll use an open source tool called ffmpeg, which is a C++ library and command-line tool for converting, resizing, or resampling media from one format to another, with more than 50 formats supported.

In its simplest form, you can call ffmpeg.exe by passing in two command-line arguments, the source file that you want to convert and the name of the new file you want it converted to. For example, we can convert a Flash video file named source.flv into an MP4 (MPEG-4) format file named destination.mp4 using the command shown in Example 4-26.

Example 4-26. Converting a flash video to the MP4 video format

ffmpeg.exe -i "source.flv" "destination.mp4"

To convert the source.flv file into a .wmv (Windows Media Video) file, add the -vcodec wmv2 command-line arguments, as shown in Example 4-27.

Example 4-27. Converting a flash video to the WMV video format

ffmpeg.exe -i "source.flv" -vcodec wmv2 "destination.wmv"

You can even add metadata—such as the author, title, and comment—to the newly converted video by setting additional ffmpeg.exe command-line arguments, as shown in Example 4-28.

Example 4-28. Setting metadata when converting a video

ffmpeg.exe -title "My Video Title" -author "Dan" ...