Spam: The other white meat

FFmpeg wrapper just got a nice little utility for testing FFmpeg conversion settings. For most people the knowledge of video and audio codecs is a bit of an arcane science- what settings go with what codec, much less the rules about audio formats... it is all a bit messy.

So I've put together the beginnings of an interface that lets an admin select a file uploaded to the server and run tests to their hearts content on it. Bitrates, codecs, and all the other options that FFmpeg Wrapper provides are available for use.

Perhaps the most important aspect, however, is the debugging data that the FFmpeg provides when the conversion fails. If you are converting a 48khz wmv file to flv and wondering why the conversion keeps failing, this will help you see that you need to set the audio bit rate to 44.1khz.

The interface is not perfect, and certainly the ability to pass the testing function a file path as an argument would be very helpful (especially off the Drupal attached files list), but these are all things to come.

Code is CVS DRUPAL-5 branch, will get ported up to 6x sometime soon.

Here you can see the file selection and FFmpeg options to set when you want to test out a file. These are all the same options that Media Mover's FFmpeg module offers.

This screen shot shows the aftermath of a bad conversion attempt.  If you read the error in the FFmpeg output, you can see that it is alerting that the sample rate is wrong.

This shows the conversion working properly, though this is on a different file, it demonstrates what a succssful conversion looks like.