chop chop chop, flash video

July 26, 2006 9:33 PM

How to split a flash movie (.FLV) file?

I just spent a day yesterday ripping and encoding an hour's worth of video to .flv for a client. The video itself is actually about six ten-minute segments put together. Instead of having to split the original video and re-encode everything all over again, is there any way I can split the .flv files on a mac?

I've searched everywhere and my google-fu is failing me. I have FCP 5, Quicktime Pro, and Flash 8 if that helps. Help me, AskMe!

posted by suedehead to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

This is not technically possible. FLV is a compressed file format (think JPG) and as such when you edit it, it must be recompressed. So you have 2 options. Break up the original video and re-encode OR use a FLV encoding program such as http://rivavx.com/?encoder that will re-encode part of the original FLV (but it will have less quality than starting from scratch). Unfortunately, your best option is to start from scratch. Sorry.
posted by crypticgeek at 12:03 AM on July 27, 2006

The FLV Parser should help (source code included)

Here's the description:

Its intended use is to convert a large FLV into a series of shorter FLVs based on a series of millisecond-based timecodes. Using the -s switch will split the audio and video of the outputted files; the audio track will be extracted as a series of MP3 files, and the short FLVs produced will have no audio track at all.
posted by labnol at 5:05 AM on July 27, 2006

The quality will be even worse.

FLV, like MPEG is a lossy codec both spatially (think jpeg) and temporaly. You'll end up trying to make a "cut" on a frame that doesn't have all the data.

Best to reencode.
posted by filmgeek at 7:56 AM on July 27, 2006