Flash (.flv) Video on a Drupal Site - FlashVideo module

Have you ever wanted your own little youtube, or just to be able to have video on your site thats not linked from somewhere else?  I needed it recently, so went through the process of looking at all the flash video modules only to be turned off by the complexity most of them... so I went back to one I first used a few years ago with a friend and developer who helped modify the code written by Travist so that it worked in Drupal 4.7.

The biggest problem with the FlashVideo module is getting the conversion working (ie: upload a .wmv movie file, and have the site automagically turn it into a .flv so that it can be used).

The documentation is (and always has been) totally hopeless for the module as far as the backend conversion goes... but the module itself is great. 

Ok, so my server is Ubuntu-based, and based on the 8.04LTS package - if you are not using Debian or Ubuntu then this process will probably fail you... but it may provide clues to help.

Firstly, what does the conversion?  A very impressive little package called FFMPEG.  But unfortunately its not just a case of installing it - you need a bunch of extras as well to get it to convert different file types... so read on:

Firstly, we need Medibuntu (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions In Ubuntu) repositories (check here if you have a different Ubuntu release):

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Then we need the PGP key to access them:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update

Now we need to remove FFMPEG in case it is installed

sudo apt-get remove ffmpeg

And re-install it (from the Medibuntu archive this time)

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

And finally the extras we need:

sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavcodec1d libavformat-dev libavformat1d libavutil-dev libavutil1d libpostproc-dev libpostproc1d libswscale-dev libswscale1d

And that should be it... installing the module is straight forward, and obtaining a flash player (I use the JW Player and have an older version that isn't covered in advertising) should also be straight forward... then enable the flash module for the relevant content types and bingo, you're off and racing. (ok, so I glossed over the last bit... if you are having trouble with it just leave a comment and I'll see what I can do to help)