DIGG IT! I had a situation where I needed to edit an FLV today. And went searching for an application to edit this common file format. It seems that the only FLV editor on the planet is written in Flex using Adobe AIR. I am really impressed by the application and I actually think it is one of the best AIR applications I have used. It is a simple utility and gives you direct binary editability into an FLV file. You can inject and edit FLV metadata and crop at any FLV keyframe.
RICHFLV AIR
Hats off to Benjamin Dobler for this great app! :)
Cheers,
Ted :)
I would guess that the reason no one else has made an FLV editor is because generally the workflow is to edit the original clip in its native format, and then export to flv. FLV might be a common output format, but I have never heard of anyone editing in that format. We use flv solely as a compressed output format for the purpose of loading our video into flash player. Editing in flv is a bad idea for the same reason as editing in any compressed format is - you want to edit the source and then compress on output to maintain the best possible quality.
I have been using this since it was released. Glad to see it's getting it's well deserved spotlight.
Fuad is right... but, sometimes you just gotta git-er done. This is indeed a nice app, thanks for posting.
Hey Ted,
glad you like RichFLV :-)
@fuad kamal:
In general you`re right but the reason I developed this was because sometimes you export you flv which can take a long time and then you realize you need to make small adjustments. Like to cut the first 2 seconds or add a cuepoint. Normally you would have to start the whole ecoding process again. This is where I think an FLV editor makes sense.
Benz
@fuad kamal:
ah and you preserve the quality of the flv because it does not recompress the file when editing. It just plays with the flv tags and rearranges them so no loss of quality.
I think you guys are missing a key user group for this application.
I have many non-technical friends who are avid youtube users, and reguslarly download videos from youtube in flv format. Many of them would love the ability to edit these videos slightly.
They don't care about file formats, they don't want to have to do a lengthy file conversion, they don't need perfect quality. They just want to edit their video file.
a-we-so-me!
I would only see a more precise control over which frame will be the starting one and the end one for "cropping" video!
There was need for this tool!
Thank you
very cool. Thanks for sharing!
@void:
You can go into the keyframe panel and select any keyframe available in the flv and at the bottom you can select "Set Inpoint"/"Set Outpoint".
It can only cut on keyframes because otherwise it would not play correctly...
Benjamin
Point about editing flv and f4v files is that these are going to be *the* source files. FME in combination with videosources (grabbers for pal-/ntsc-video, dvi-/vga-signals, ...) could provide a nice consistent, scriptable way to get video into the pc.
In most cases the video quality is sufficient. Would be overkill - practically make it unusable - to use dv, tapes of 60 min ... all this prof-video stuff... brr :)
I just need a good editor in case I want or need to do clean up the flv and f4v a bit.
I have to have a closer look at RichFLV. It doesn't work with f4v though - or does it?
Can keyframes be added to FLV files (in a future version of RichFLV or in any other way)?
Really useful tool.
Thanks,
Denis, from Brazil
Superb tool... BTW Benjamin if you show this tool to Google, I'm sure they will pay you a fortune and make u their employee :)
@Venkat: Haha thanks but I would rather like to get employed by Adobe ;-)
Nice work, Benjamin...I think any video format as popular as flv deserves, even needs to have an editor...what if you download a video and want to make changes to it? Or if you want to change the soundtrack? This is a very common situation nowadays, and you have given us a tool to solve the problem. Great job.
ahhh...just a curiosity: when I try to export an flv as swf, the program shows an "file is being saved" message, for a looong time...till it freezes. Is this long delay normal or is it a frequent bug? The flv file is quite small (300 kb) so I donīt know if the program has frozen or if it is really processing the flv into swf...could you shed some light on that? Thanks again.
There is also Movica @ http://movica.sourceforge.net
Movica is apparently one of those programs that intentionally deceives you. Doesn't accept flv as source, bad editor also, but it doesn't claim to be much in that department.
Does anyone know a way to change the videodatarate of an FLV? Mine is way too high and I no longer have access to my original QT file! Please help, thanks!
Maybe I'm blind, but I can't find any description of how to use it. I've installed a video but there is no help file and I've clicked all over... not a computer novice by any means, either. Anyone give me a hand? I want to cut the last couple seconds off a video.
very useful, thanks for highlighting.
@ anonymous
use this free app to compress FLV:
http://www.cocoonsoftware.com
Hi Ben,
Im just trying to make a small change on my editing wich is already export in FLV. I need to know if i can use this software whitout AIR... if not can i do it an other way?
THx
Kenny
Just tried it and am impressed. Would be nice to display the name of the file being processed.
Mal
Hi Craig Pollock here, was having trouble downloading and launching the setup for the rich flv if you have any tips i would appreciate it.
After installng it, how do I get it to work? Where's the command line? I must have missed something here.