Rob's Blog

Anyone using FFMPEG to create FLV format video/audio will probably know that the resulting files are missing some important metadata (particularly the “duration” item which is used by many Flash based FLV players to control the progress bar). There are a few tools available to inject this metadata back into your FLV files, the most common being the cross-platform FLVTool2 (available here), and the Windows only FLVMDI (available from here).

One other tool that unfortunately misses out in the search engine rankings is YAMDI (Yet Another MetaData Injector). I stumbled on this great bit of code the other day, and was thoroughly impressed. It is lightweight, dead easy to use and most importantly, incredibly fast. For example, YAMDI finishes processing a 9Mb FLV file in milliseconds, whilst FLVTool2 takes around 5 seconds to complete^*. The YAMDI homepage rather understates just how good this tool is.

YAMDI is available for BSD/*nix platforms only, but since it’s written in C and the source is available, I am sure it would be portable to a Windows environment if someone was determined enough to try.

^*Disclaimer: I have no accurately timed results to back up this claim. The statement is based on my own, limited testing on a P4 running at 2.8Ghz with 512M RAM.