I’ve just completed an update to our video hosting system, MiddMedia, to enable it to support the upload of additional video formats.

The Adobe Flash Media Server (FMS) — the software on MiddMedia that handles streaming the video data to clients — only supports the MP3 Audio (.mp3), Flash Video (.flv), and MPEG-4 video with H.264 encoding (.mp4) formats. Up until this point, users were required to convert their videos into one of the two supported video formats before uploading them to MiddMedia. Depending on the user’s operating system and the software they have installed, this could be a challenging proposition. With this update, videos in a variety of formats can be uploaded directly to the MiddMedia server where they will be automatically converted.

When you upload a video of another format to MiddMedia now, you will at first see a placeholder video with the message “Converting Video, Please Wait”. You may make use of the embed code or links for the video at this point, even while the video is being converted in the background on the server. Once your new video is ready it will replace the placeholder when you refresh the page.

Depending on the number of users uploading videos at the same time, conversion may take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more. If an error occurs, the video will display a message of “Conversion Failed” rather than the “Converting Video, Please Wait” message.

Server-side video conversion is being handled by FFmpeg, an open-source video conversion tool that supports 157 container formats and 289 audio and video codecs. We are launching this update to MiddMedia with support for a limited number of formats, however we can easily enable any additional ones that are also supported by FFmpeg.

Currently supported video formats:
(see the wiki for an up to date list)
No conversion needed:

• MPEG-4 video with H.264 encoding (.mp4)
• Flash video (.flv)

With conversion:

• .avi – Audio Video Interleave (video/x-msvideo)
• .asf – Advanced Systems Format (video/x-ms-asf)
• .dv – Digital Video (video/x-dv)
• .m4v – iTunes Video (video/x-m4v)
• .mj2 – Motion JPEG 2000 Video (video/x-motion-jpeg)
• .mjp – Motion JPEG Video (video/x-motion-jpeg)
• .mjpg – Motion JPEG Video (video/x-motion-jpeg)
• .mkv – Matroska Video (video/x-matroska)
• .mov – Apple QuickTime Movie (video/quicktime)
• .mpeg – MPEG Video (video/mpeg)
• .mpg – MPEG Video (video/mpeg)
• .ogv – Ogg Vorbis Video (video/ogg)
• .qt – Apple QuickTime Movie (video/quicktime )
• .rv – Real Video (video/vnd-rn-realvideo)
• .wmv – Windows Media Video (video/x-ms-wmv)