I had to convert a video to FLV to play on a Flash Video Player, but I was on a computer where I couldn’t just install a regular converter to get a WMV (for Windows Media Player 9) to become a FLV.
Instead I used a simple little trick with Youtube.com. REgister for an account and then upload your video. Once you video has been uploaded and processes (this may take a while and seemed to take longer on my first video even though it was short) you can access its link.
Let’s go for an example.
Start off with the video you want to use, perhaps the Granger Community Church Volunteer Appreciation.
Once it is loaded do a View Source on the page (typically by right clicking on the page and selecting “View Source”) and search inside the file for the letters “swf”.
This will bring you to a line with the following: “/player.swf?video_id=niDQVULGZcY&l=477&t=OEgsToPDskJ9Tcx_4TKhuIiMxGWp-X5k
Highlight everything after video_id= until you reach the &s= (you can actually include everyting up to the ” and take in the full end of the URL, but that is unnecessary). Copy that for later pasting in the address bar.
YouTube has left their video handling php file available so you can link to it from outside. Just put the file address together with the video ID and you get
http://youtube.com/get_video.php?video_id=
niDQVULGZcY&l=477&t=OEgsToPDskJ9Tcx_4TKhuIiMxGWp-X5k
(Broken to fit in the blog better)
When you save it to your computer you have an actual working flv file.
Unfortunately the video I did had some audio/video sync problems so we ended up just using the wmv for now.
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