Installing FFmpeg to Manipulate Video SWF Files

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∟Installing FFmpeg to Manipulate Video SWF Files

This section introduces the FFmpeg package that can be used to manipulate video stream SWF files, and other multimedia data.

The best tool to manipulate video and audio stream SWF files is probably the FFmpeg package.

What Is FFmpeg? FFmpeg (Fast Forward MPEG) is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data.

FFmpeg contains the following components:

ffmpeg is a command-line tool that converts audio or video formats. It can also grab and encode in real-time from a TV card.
ffserver is an HTTP and RTSP multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. It can also time shift live broadcast.
ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries.
ffprobe is a command-line tool to show media information (text, CSV, XML), see also Mediainfo.
libswresample is a library containing audio resampling routines.
libavresample is a library containing audio resampling routines from the Libav project, completely different from libswresample from ffmpeg.
libavcodec is a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performance and high code reusability.
libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for audio/video container formats.
libavutil is a helper library containing routines common to different parts of FFmpeg. This library includes Adler-32, CRC, MD5, RIPEMD, SHA-1, SHA-2, LZO decompressor, Base64 encoder/decoder, DES encrypter/decrypter, RC4 encrypter/decrypter and AES encrypter/decrypter.
libpostproc is a library containing video postprocessing routines.
libswscale is a library containing video image scaling and colorspace/pixelformat conversion routines.
libavfilter is the substitute for vhook which allows the video/audio to be modified or examined between the decoder and the encoder.

Note that FFmpeg package can only be used on stream (video and/or audio) SWF files.

Downloading and installing FFmpeg on Windows is easy:

Go to http://ffmpeg.org/download.html download page.
Click on "Zeranoe FFmpeg Builds" in the Windows section.
Click on "just download the 32-bit static builds". The download process starts.
Save the download file "ffmpeg-latest-win32-static.7z" to temporary folder.
Unzip "ffmpeg-latest-win32-static.7z" using 7-Zip or WinRAR.
Move and rename the unzipped folder "ffmpeg-20140523-git-1d36def-win32-static\" to \local\ffmpeg.

Run the following command to verify the installation:

C:\herong>\local\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg -version
ffmpeg version N-63378-g1d36def
...
libavutil      52. 86.100 / 52. 86.100
libavcodec     55. 63.100 / 55. 63.100
libavformat    55. 40.100 / 55. 40.100
libavdevice    55. 13.101 / 55. 13.101
libavfilter     4.  5.100 /  4.  5.100
libswscale      2.  6.100 /  2.  6.100
libswresample   0. 19.100 /  0. 19.100
libpostproc    52.  3.100 / 52.  3.100