Gordon's Alive!

A few years ago I wrote a small servlet to allow QuickTime movies to be converted into Flash video on the fly, specifically to support playback on the Wii -- I gave it the rather unimaginative name Quick As A Flash. I've had little need to update the code until recently when I upgraded my main PC from Windows to Ubuntu.

I have a web app that I wrote and use to index/search all the DVDs I own. It interfaces with Amazon to get artwork and reviews and allows for linking trailers to each film. I had been using Apple's QuickTime for Java to get the dimensions and duration of the QuickTime trailers I was adding to the index. Unfortunately this has a) never been available under Linux and b) has been deprecated by Apple. So I decided to revisit Quick As A Flash and add support for extracting this information to the servlet.

Quick As A Flash uses FFmpeg to do the transcoding to Flash and it is trivial to read the dimensions and duration of the movie from the FFmpeg output. In a simply case of I-could-so-I-did I've also added support for generating a thumbnail image from the QuickTime movie.

I've no idea if anyone else is using this code or would ever find it useful but if you are interested then you can grab a binary copy or track progress on the Jenkins build page.