Sharing videos
With so many different video formats (wmv for Microsoft, mov for Apple, etc) it can sometimes be difficult to share videos between friends. Besides dealing with different formats, users must deal with transferring large files. Some videos are just too big to stuff in an email. Maybe that's why YouTube has become so popular.
Still, YouTube doesn't accept every media type. Increasingly, videos are being made available in yet another format, Macromedia's flash video format. So how does someone post a movie on YouTube when its in a format that YouTube doesn’t support. Here’s how.
- Download and install VLC media player for free http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
- Start VLC media player and drop the flv file on the player.
- Select "File | Wizard", "Transcode/Save to file", Next
- Select "Existing playlist", Next
- Select "Transcode video", "Transcode audio", Next (leave everything else as defaults)
- Select "MPEG 1", Next
- Select Choose, give the new file a name with an mpeg extension, Next
VLC can transcode the video into a variety of formats. I ran some tests with different "Encapsulation formats" to see how YouTube would react. Here are the results for "070220-sword9p1.flv".
sword-mpeg1-mpeg1-partial.mpg : Rejected (length of video is too long sword-mpeg1-mpeg1.mpg : Live! sword-mpeg1-mpegps.mpg : Rejected (length of video is too long) sword-mpeg1-mpegts.mpg : Rejected (length of video is too long) sword-mpeg1-ogg.mpg : Failed (invalid file format) sword-mpeg1-raw.mpg : Failed (invalid file format)
