Fast-Start Enabled Videos with FFMpeg
MPEG 4 is the most dominant video format for the web, which is supported on a variety of platforms and devices. And FFmpeg is the most popular software for encoding videos. While there are tons of articles about encoding MPEG 4 videos with FFmpeg, most of them fail to warn you about something: most video players will not start the playback until the whole video is downloaded. This could be annoying, especially for large videos. Here is a video encoded with the following command and played via two methods; the HTML5 video tag and Flash-based video player: ffmpeg.exe -i big_buck_bunny_trailer-1080p.ogg -c:v libx264 -profile:v baseline -preset slow -b:v 800k -c:a libvo_aacenc -b:a 128k -s 512x288 big_buck_bunny_trailer-288p.mp4 HTML5 Video 1, 2 Flash Player 1 To create a "fast-start" enabled video using FFMpeg, specify -movflags faststart parameter in the command 3 : ffmpeg.exe -i big_buck_bunny_tr