macromedia flash flashcom: Hello,
I have a Flash project in which the user records a video with their webcam in
Flash. The video is transmitted to Flash Communications Server as an FLV file,
and I leave it there to be played later.

1. Because I have the quality set high (90), the file is huge (~80
KBytes/sec). Is there any way that I can compress the video either client-side
while it uploads or server-side when it gets there?

2. One idea that I had was to transcode the video server-side to another
format in hopes of improving the compression. Unfortunately, none of the
transcoding or compression engines recognize the FLV as a valid file. I tried
On2, ffmpeg, Riva, Sorenson, etc. The FLV does play ok and seems valid, but
these tools fail when trying to convert it.

Thanks very much for any help.

To decrease the bitrate, see the docs for camera.setMode, camera.setRate, and
camera.setQuality.

Transcoding flv files created by FMS is a tough one. The problem is that the
audio is encoded with Nellymoser's Asao codec, with is closed and proprietary.
At the moment, the only way to leagally obtain the codec is to buy Nellymoser's
conversion utility, whick comes with a hefty price tag.

See this site for links to flv to XXX conversion discussions:

http://nellymoser.codec.googlepages.com/