ffmpeg-utils
------------

A plugin extra to make use of the ffmpeg media conversion utility.

NB: Consider this as experimental - only install on a live board if
you know what you are doing.

Install in the usual way and adjust parameters on LDM/admin/settings

Currently, the extra supports:

a) Extracting first frame of a video as LDM's thumbnail image for an entry

Image is stored in upload directory, so *upload_dir* must be set.

This also integrates smoothly with the JWmediaplayer inline extra, so that the
first frame will appear in the video screen before it starts up.

b) Conversion of uploaded videos into a standard site format (e.g. flash)

This can be set to be done automatically as part of the upload process or
manually using the LDM admin pages (admin/ffmpeg link on top left side of
admin pages).  You may prefer the second approach if you allow large
uploads - transcoding is  very cpu-intensive.

On successful completion, the original upload is deleted.


Notes:
------

a) ffmpeg installation

You must separately install ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.org/) on your server
so that it is accessible using the command lines specified on the extra's admin
settings.

How you do this depends upon server operating system and php settings,
such as safe mode, etc. Which file formats can be processed
also depends on the version of ffmpeg and available codecs.

This is up to you - I will not get involved in this part of
the installation.

b) file and directory names

ffmpeg seems sensitive to non-alpha characters such as spaces in filenames,
so you should avoid these characters anywhere in the full directory path.

c) resources

You must configure the web server to allow sufficient resources
to complete the transcoding task (settings in php.ini). Video reformatting
is resource intensive, so you should allow a large amount of memory
(e.g. 128M) and a large maximum cpu time for transcoding video files. The extra
attempts to disable any cpu time limit before execution.

During my tests, an 8Mb avi file took 3 seconds to transcode using
an Intel E2200 processor; a 127Mb file took 295 seconds.

Tested: 14.06.2009