How to convert various video file formats into FLV (for FlowPlayer)?

We need to allow our users to upload video files (which will be in various different formats naturally), and convert them all into FLV so it can be streamed using FlowPlayer (http://flowplayer.org/).

What would be better FFmpeg or mencoder? And what should be the appropriate commands / arguments for the various steps.

I've had a look at:

hxxp://flowplayer.org/tutorials/mencoder.html

and:

hxxp://flowplayer.org/tutorials/ffmpeg.html

But we havent been able to figure out how to make a "generic" conversion without getting into the "trial-and-error" zone. I dont need to encode "into" a certain fixed bitrate/etc, I just want to get it converted into FLV so it can play on FlowP开发者_如何转开发layer

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Have you tried looking at other questions on the site? Video Convert to flv and Programmatically convert a video to FLV for instance?

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Personally I've found the FFmpeg command line a little verbose and complicated. Some of the example blogs going into FFmpeg various command line switches of little help either.

However, there's a great front-end for FFmpeg called WinFF which makes the transcoding painless, just drop in the files you want to convert and click the output folder, and quality setting. Personally I encode everything to mp4 then use flowplayer to play that directly, as this will fall back to flash if native browser support for h.264 isn't available. iOS Support

For completeness sake WinFF also includes an option to display the command line, handy if you want to build to know what switches are being used. Go to the main window and select Options -> Display CMD Line