FLV Encoder with Audio

FLV Encoder with Audio:

FlvEncoder demo implementation: Records webcam video and audio to a local file

A prospective client recently approached me about the possibility of adding audio support to SimpleFlvEncoder. They ultimately decided to go a different direction and so didn’t commission me for that work, but not before my curiosity had already gotten the better of me… :T

This class makes it possible to create FLV’s in AS3 that contain both video and audio, all on the client-side using the regular browser-based Flash Player. Like with the old version from 2007 (!), video is uncompressed (or rather, just zlib-compressed on a per-frame basis). Audio must be supplied in uncompressed PCM format with either 8 or 16 bits per sample, mono or stereo, and at 11, 22, or 44 KHz. It can also create FLV’s that contain only audio or only video.

Here is a quick-and-hand-wavey example of using the class (Please see the comments in the source for more detail.).

var flvEncoder:FlvEncoder = new FlvEncoder(_fps, _duration);
flvEncoder.setVideoProperties(_videoWidth, _videoHeight);
flvEncoder.setAudioProperties(FlvEncoder.SAMPLERATE_44KHZ, _is16Bit, _isStereo);
flvEncoder.begin();

for (var i:int = 0; i < _numFrames; i++)
{
 flvEncoder.addFrame(_myBitmaps[i], _myChunksOfAudio[i]);
}

saveOutMyFile( flvEncoder.byteArray );

The old 'SimpleFlvEncoder' class, which dealt only with video, was stupidly simple to use. Having to deal with audio ends up being a little more involved. As I said, you have to supply the audio data in PCM format, which basically just means raw, uncompressed audio. You give it the audio data in the addFrame() method. You might gather that data using Sound.extract() or SampleDataEvent, or by dynamically generating your own. Use audioFrameSize to determine how much audio data in bytes is expected per frame.

Supplying too little or too much audio per frame is I believe 'legal' per the FLV spec, so the class will take whatever size ByteArray is given to it for audio. An incorrect amount may result either in an unexpected framerate on playback or choppiness in the audio depending on the FLV playback implementation of the client program.

It's beyond the scope of this post to provide a tutorial-like explanation of playing with audio data in Flash, but let me describe what I think are the three most likely use-cases for this class when it comes to audio [...]