NAME

FLV::Info - Extract metadata from Adobe Flash Video files

SYNOPSIS 

        use FLV::Info;
        my $reader = FLV::Info->new();
        $reader->parse('video.flv');
        my %info = $reader->get_info();
        print "$info{video_count} video frames\n";
        print $reader->report();

DESCRIPTION

This module reads Adobe Flash Video (FLV) files and reports metadata about those files.

LEGAL

This work is based primarily on the file specification provided by Adobe. Use of that specification is governed by terms indicated at the licensing URL specified below.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/

LICENSE

Copyright 2006 Clotho Advanced Media, Inc., <cpan@clotho.com>

Copyright 2007-2009 Chris Dolan, <cdolan@cpan.org>

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

METHODS

$pkg->new()

Creates a new instance.

$self->parse($filename)
$self->parse($filehandle) 

        Reads the specified file. If the file does not exist or is an
        invalid FLV stream, an exception will be thrown via croak().

        There is no return value.

$self->get_info() 

        Returns a hash with all FLV metadata. Any fields that are
        multivalued are concatenated with a slash (`/') with the most common
        values specified first. For example, a common case is the
        `video_type' which is often `interframe/keyframe' since interframes
        are more common than keyframes. A less common case could be
        `audio_type' of `mono/stereo' if the FLV was mostly one-channel but
        had some packets of two-channel audio.

$self->report() 

        Returns a summary of all FLV metadata as a string. This is a
        human-readable version of the data returned by get_info().

$self->get_file() 

        Returns the FLV::File instance. This will be `undef' until you call
        parse().

SEE ALSO

FLVTool2 

        This is a rather nice Ruby implementation that can read and write
        FLV files. This code helped me figure out that the FLV documentation
        was wrong for the order of attributes in video tags. It also helped
        me understand the meta tags.

        http://inlet-media.de/flvtool2

AMF::Perl 

        This is a Perl implementation of the http://www.amfphp.org/ project
        to create an open source representation of the Flash remote
        communication protocol. This module leverages a small part of
        AMF::Perl to parse FLV meta tags.

FFmpeg 

        FFmpeg is a powerful media conversion utility. It is capable of
        reading and writing FLVs and SWFs. However as of this writing
        (2006), I believe it does not support fast transcoding between FLV
        and SWF formats. Please correct me if I'm mistaken.

        http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/

COMPATIBILITY

This module should work with FLV v1.0 and FLV v1.1 files. Any other versions (none known as of this writing) will certainly fail.

Interaction with FLVs using the screen video codec or using alpha channels is not yet tested. If someone has short videos employing those features that can be released with the FLV::Info test suite, please contact me.

The AVC support comes from an external patch and reading documentation. I have not personally tested this code on any AVC FLV files.

AUTHOR

Chris Dolan

This module was originally developed by me at Clotho Advanced Media Inc. as part of our MediaLandscape project. Now I maintain it in my spare time. I do not anticipate adding new features without external input.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The FLV::Splice feature was created with financial support from John Drago (CPAN:JOHND). Thanks!

QUALITY

I care about code quality. The FLV-Info distribution complies with the following quality metrics: