[Vnc2swf-users] vnc2flv comments and questions

[Brian C. <B.C...@po...>]

Hi,

I hope this is the right place to post about vnc2flv, the successor to
pyvnc2swf.

I had played with pyvnc2swf a bit a while ago, and I've now installed
vnc2flv-20091103 under Ubuntu Jaunty. I have a couple of suggestions to
make.

(1) I found that recordwin.sh did not work out of the box, bombing out with
the following exception when it tried to add the audio into the output:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/flvaddmp3.py", line 82, in <module>
    if __name__ == "__main__": sys.exit(main(sys.argv))
  File "/usr/local/bin/flvaddmp3.py", line 79, in main
    mp3add(srcfile, args, outfile, force=force, debug=debug)
  File "/usr/local/bin/flvaddmp3.py", line 54, in mp3add
    audio.put(writer)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/vnc2flv/audio.py", line 174, in put
    flags = (0x22 | FLV_RATE[rate])
KeyError: 8000

It seems that arecord on my machine is defaulting to 8000 samples per
second, and this is not one of the rates listed in FLV_RATE.

I was able to workaround the problem like this:

  ARECORD="arecord -r22050 -fS16_LE" recordwin.sh

(The -f flag is because arecord was defaulting to 8-bit audio; adding this
made the sound quality *much* better)

Maybe these should be the defaults?

(2) As a suggestion, it would be helpful to link to some information on how
to embed the resulting flash video into a HTML page. pyvnc2swf generates a
.html page for you, but vnc2flv doesn't, and I didn't have any experience
working with flv.

Searching the web is awkward as there seem to be lots of different programs
called "flvplayer" out there. So far I've settled on this:

    http://www.platipus.nl/flvplayer/

although I couldn't find the source code or an explicit licence.

I also found flowplayer, but I want something which is truly free, even for
use on a commercial website. Flowplayer's site is contradictory here - it
claims to have a fully open source GPL edition, but then says you can't
remove their branding?!

The following commands were useful for displaying the flv files directly:

    ffplay xxx.flv

    ffplay -stats xxx.flv
    (also displays useful info like duration, screen size, and codecs)

    mplayer -vo x11 xxx.flv
    (for some reason, I got a blank window and lots of BadAlloc errors
    without the -vo flag. This is probably an issue with my laptop, an
    old Thinkpad X30)

Anyway, many thanks for releasing and continuing to develop this software!

Regards,

Brian.