FlasCC and video encoder

Question

hi,
i don't know a lot about FlasCC but i think it might be possible to write a fast video encoder with it from c++ library?
I want a cross-platform solution to encode bitmapdata to video (mp4 or standard format). Right now i use native extension and it's a pain in the a** to import to android, windows, mac etc etc.
Is there anything that i'm not aware that would be able to encode bitmapdata to video like a ffmpeg port to swc from flasCC or something like that ?
I know there a FLV Writer that was made with alchemy some years ago but it only create flv and flv is not a standard format (iOS and Android can't open those format).
Any help on that matter will REALLY help me in my current project as my project create video from bitmapdata.
Regards,
Paul-André Belle-Isle

Answer 1

Hi Paul-André,
The easiest solution would be to use ffmpeg in SWC. But so far I didn't get an answer here / don't understand why when I export ffmpeg to SWC it keeps reporting stack overflow(when compiled as SWF it works fine with their example). If this could be resolved it would be pretty easy to convert to mpeg4 or other ffmpeg supported formats, with ffmpeg SWC library wrapped with a custom wrapper. I poked with ffmpeg some more, and when compiling with -O4 my example compiled without any stack overflow. The sample is trivial (encoding some MPEG1 dummy frames), but the library didn't crash with stack overflow. The only other side is the swf size jumps ~+1MB. So I guess the other task would be to write simple AS3<->ffmpeg wrapper, and understand/implement their muxing examples.
If ffmpeg swc doesn't work,  I'd say it would have to be the same route I took with ogg...e.g. getting specialized encoder, like http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html, attaching a custom wrapper for Flash for addFrame, encode etc. Btw. I did manage to make my OGG encoder async, basically calling addFrame every frame like the FLV encoder does. x264 is of course it's a video stream only, not mpeg4 container. Libtheora produces OGV file, so there it wasn't an issue.
So additionally this means getting a specialized mp4 muxer. I googled around and happened to find: http://gpac.wp.mines-telecom.fr/mp4box/ - it's a commnad line tool and from the source code this appears to do the job. But of course, thats another lib to compile for FlasCC (edit: this wouldn't be necessary if ffmpeg will work without other issues as I wrote above).
Finally about speed, depends on what you need - in my app I'm replaying some animation and capturing a 800x450 container. Comparing to the trivial Alchemy FLV lib I've been using before it's a bit slower but still fine - on my machine(3 years old pretty cheap laptop) -
FLV encoding: ~11fps
OGG encoding: ~7.3fps
So all in all, depends how you want to use it but surely it wouldn't be an easy job I've got also some paid/personal projects ongoing, i'd be willing to look into this further out of curiosity as well but only for good compensation - this is a bit hardcore(either solving stack overflow creating wrapper for ffmpeg and adapt their muxing example for it, or making mp4box work). If you want to discuss this further, probably better to drop me an email to [email protected]