flv streaming

High performance flv-streaming with lighttpd is possible since lighttpd 1.4.11.

With lighty you can easily handle 10000 parallel downloads of your movies including protection against hot-linking with mod_secdownload. This is basicly all you need to build the free video.google.com for yourself.

Just add this you your lighttpd.conf and restart the server:

server.modules = ( ..., "mod_flv_streaming", ... )

flv-streaming.extensions = ( ".flv" )

Players

mod_flv_streaming expects you to fetch the flv-file with a GET parameter if you want to do a seek into the file.

GET /movie.flv?start=23 HTTP/1.1 Host: ...

• Fabian Topfstedt has done this for us. Get his player and place it in the webfolder. To use the player you have include this piece of HTML:

  • <object

    • classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"

      codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0" width="336" height="297"> <param name="movie" value="scrubber.swf?file=/movie.flv" /> <param name="quality" value="high" /> <embed src="scrubber.swf?file=/movie.flv"

      • quality="high"

        pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"

      • type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
        • width="336"

          height="297"></embed>

    </object>

• for the RMP you can use a simple rewrite to get it working with mod_flv_streaming
  • url.rewrite = (

    • "^/name-of-php-script.php\?file=(.+)&position=0$" => "/$1", "^/name-of-php-script.php\?file=(.+)&position=([0-9]+)$" => "/$1?start=$2",

    )

encoding flash movies

As example I took a video from Ryan Wiebers page about Saber-Effects.

The .mov file was converted into a .flv with the help of ffmpeg and indexed with flvtool2.

$ wget http://ryanw.michaelfrisk.com/ryan-w/clips/kid_fight.mov $ ffmpeg -i kid_fight.mov kid_fight.flv $ flvtool2 -U kid_fight.flv