Recently I’ve had to deal with converting user uploaded video files to flv format. Up until today my initial experiments were unsuccessful.

First, I started with the project FFmpeg. In the beginning it looked promising but rapidly fell short. It wasn’t as platform agnostic as I would prefer (getting it to install my Wamp environment was a pain) and there were a couple outright show stoppers.

For instance, I wanted to grab the dimensions and length of a video file. Ordinarily this would be achievable by parsing the return value of a shell_exec, like so.

Unfortunately, it returns null. Huh. Fancy that.

Now, this isn’t to say that FFmpeg isn’t a fantastic library, and the existance of FFmpeg-php is a major bonus in my books, but the barrier to entry is huge on this one.

Next up was Carbon Coder. Let’s ignore for a moment that there’s a $5,000 price tag attached to it. CC had a free trial which I immediately wanted to try out.

Please note that the Carbon Coder Free Trial utilizes a USB security device that must be shipped in addition to the software (i.e., the Free Trial is not a download).

Well, that sucks.

Finally, I discovered the Flix Engine by On2. During Windows development I can use COM objects (easily accessible via PHP), and on Linux I can use PHP methods and objects I haven’t quite delved into yet.

A couple trials were immediately successful. I find myself overjoyed.

If you can swallow the price, I definitely recommend trying this out.