Recently mediaRAIN produced a site for a local sculptor that features a video of the sculptor speaking about his artwork. He then came back to us and wanted us to make a few changes to the site, including the addition of a few animated elements on the site that were triggered by various points in the video. A perfect situation for using onCuePoint, right?

I set about making these changes, putting off adding the cue point metadata to the FLV files, as I wasn’t looking forward to re-encoding the videos. Even on a dual-processor PowerMac, it still takes some time to encode those FLV files. (There were three of them.) Plus, if I got one in the wrong spot, I’d have to re-encode the video again. So, like I said, I wasn’t looking forward to it. However, I found a very useful tool in FLVTool2.

FLVTool2 is an open-source, command-line tool written in Ruby for tweaking and manipulating your FLV files. You can trim FLV files, and add cue points to them after the videos have been encoded. Adding these cue points to my FLV files was a lot faster than it would have been if I’d had to re-encode each video. You just define the cue points in an XML file, point FLVTool2 at the FLV files, tell it where to find the XML file defining the new metadata, and then tell it where to put the new files. Once I ran the command, it only took about 15-20 seconds to update all three of my FLV files. I had to tweak the timing of one or two of them, and it was only a matter of seconds to run FLVTool2 again.

There are few other utilites I found that do the same thing, however, I like this one as it was open-source, and it will run under OSX, Windows, and Linux, which means you could even set it up to edit your FLV files on the server if you needed to. Very cool. If you’re doing a lot of work with FLV files and video in Flash, this is one you should check out. Of course if you are doing that kind of work, then you probably know about this one already. Either way, it’s pretty cool.

Link: FLVTool2