Joomla is a very popular content management system that is popular amongst websites and can usually be automatically installed using Fantastico (Joomla web hosting is available on our web hosting plans) however the question comes often that if this very popular software is what you exactly need.

While Joomla is very expandable and can have a lot of modules to accomplish anything, sometimes it would be considered an overkill, as per example, using Joomla for a blog is usually an overkill unless you have a very advanced blog, however a great alternative for Joomla if you want to create your blog would be WordPress (which can be installed using Fantastico too).

However, if you have a site with a couple of pages but require a forum and other type of scripts where creating a theme for each would take a long time, Joomla is a good option however if you only have a couple of pages without the the need of theming, the best option might just be to stick with plain HTML.

So there are no wrong choices in this case however there are better in cases, if you’re going to use Joomla’s full capacities then it’s suggested however if you’ll be only using part of it, then maybe you’re looking at the wrong script.

Step 1: Preparing for your domain transfer
There are a few things that need to be done before initiating a domain transfer, first you will need to login to your current domain registrar and make sure that your domain is unlocked else the domain name transfer will fail, also, the domain name must be registered for more than 60 days. Once the domain name is unlocked, you should make sure that all of your WHOIS information is valid information because they will be needed for the verification when sending your transfer request. After checking all of the above, you may now request your authorization key or EPP transfer code, instructions on how to get this should be provided by your domain registrar.

Step 2: Initiating the domain transfer
Once you have your authorization key or EPP transfer code in hand, you may now go to your new domain name registrar or web hosting company and find the “Transfer a domain name” function, once there, you will be asked for the domain name and afterwards the authorization key or EPP transfer code, make sure you copy-paste both to avoid any writing mistakes. You will also have to pay the fees involved after giving your authorization key or EPP transfer code, all domain name transfers include one year so that means you will get an extra year by transferring your domain name, usually, the price for the domain name transfer is the same price as a registration.

Step 3: Verifying the domain transfer
You should now check the email account placed in the WHOIS information for the coming 24-48 hours, there will be two emails that will be coming, first, it will be your new registrar confirming that you the owner of the domain name would like to transfer that domain name, afterwards, you will receive an email from your old registrar confirming that you would indeed like to release the domain name from their registry. These are the two most crucial steps to do, if you do not agree to transfer the domain in a short time frame, the transfer will automatically be cancelled.

Step 4: Completing & checking the transfer
Once you have agreed to both emails, you should await an email from your new registrar confirming the acquisition of your domain name, make sure that it is indeed in your account at your new registrar and for an extra verification step, make a WHOIS check on the domain name using any of the WHOIS sites on the internet, you can search Google for “WHOIS” and you will find them in the first few results. Put your domain in the field to WHOIS and you should see the name of your new registrar. You have completed transferring your domain name from your old registrar to the new registrar.

So, as I’ve written in an earlier article on how to install FFMPEG on your server, while there are those who probably use a “YouTube Clone” script, there might be those who want to create their own using FFMPEG & PHP. FLV is the most widely used type of codec that runs on most Flash players.

So, let’s get started, there are actually a few steps into converting a file to FLV which are shown below

1. Send the script to FFMPEG-PHP and get it’s info
So, before doing any of this, you should make sure that your file has been uploaded to somewhere and you have the full path to it. (You can’t use what you have in “memory”, so you’ll have to look on how to upload a file, once you got that and have the path of the file, we’ll start our script to invoke FFMPEG-PHP and get the file’s resolution. What we mainly need is the width, height & FPS (frame per second) so that we can tell FFMPEG about. I’ll be using the clock.avi located in every windows system.

We’ll start out our code with getting our variables:

// Set our source file
$srcFile = "/path/to/clock.avi";
$destFile = "/path/to/clock.flv";
$ffmpegPath = "/path/to/ffmpeg";
$flvtool2Path = "/path/to/flvtool2";

// Save our needed variables
$srcWidth = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameWidth());
$srcHeight = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameHeight());
$srcFPS = $ffmpegObj->getFrameRate();

Also, the width/height has to be multiples of two so I have created a function that makes it a multiple of two:

function makeMultipleTwo ($value)
{
$sType = gettype($value/2);

if($sType == "integer")
{
return $value;
} else {
return ($value-1);
}
}

2. Send the script to FFMPEG for encoding
Here is where the fun starts, executing it and telling FFMPEG where to place it later. Let’s see on how our command will consist and what it will be made of. We’ll see what quality settings we will have to set.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv

That’s generally how to convert a video.avi to video.flv with the audio sampling at 22050 & audio bit rate at 32, with the size 320×240. While I suggest the values above for audio as they are the most compressed, but we’ll use the old audio settings for better quality.

$srcAB = intval($ffmpegObj->getAudioBitRate()/1000);
$srcAR = $ffmpegObj->getAudioSampleRate();

Now we have pretty much most of the values ready for our compression, however, we need to call flvtool2 to get our Meta information. Steps 4 and 5 in the diagram work simultaneously with this one.

What we do is make flvtool2 run at the same time as FFMPEG so we’ll pipe it into the command which means our general command is

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv | flvtool2 -U stdin video.flv

Now, we have a kind of complete command, let’s make our final code!

<?php
// Set our source file
$srcFile = "/path/to/clock.avi";
$destFile = "/path/to/clock.flv";
$ffmpegPath = "/path/to/ffmpeg";
$flvtool2Path = "/path/to/flvtool2";
// Create our FFMPEG-PHP class
$ffmpegObj = new ffmpeg_movie($srcFile);
// Save our needed variables
$srcWidth = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameWidth());
$srcHeight = makeMultipleTwo($ffmpegObj->getFrameHeight());
$srcFPS = $ffmpegObj->getFrameRate();
$srcAB = intval($ffmpegObj->getAudioBitRate()/1000);
$srcAR = $ffmpegObj->getAudioSampleRate();
// Call our convert using exec()
exec($ffmpegPath . " -i " . $srcFile . " -ar " . $srcAR . " -ab " . $srcAB . " -f flv -s " . $srcWidth . "x" . $srcHeight . " " . $destFile . " | " . $flvtool2Path . " -U stdin " . $destFile);
// Make multiples function
function makeMultipleTwo ($value)
{
$sType = gettype($value/2);
if($sType == "integer")
{
return $value;
} else {
return ($value-1);
}
}
?>

While browsing over at Amazon.ca, I just saw this and popped to my eye.. a 2$ brand new 19″ LCD! Better yet, apply for the Amazon VISA credit card and they’ll credit you 30$ — A free 19″ LCD!

A lot of people are getting hiring people to install FFMPEG as they think it’s a difficult task, but it’s much easier than you think if you follow these instructions. You should have root access & basic Linux knowledge to the server to follow these instructions.

1. Create a directory to do our work in
mkdir ~/ffmpeg
cd ~/ffmpeg

2. Get all the source files
wget http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/ essential-20061022.tar.bz2
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/9225/ flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ ogg/libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ vorbis/libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz

3. Extract all the source files
bunzip2 essential-20061022.tar.bz2; tar xvf essential-20061022.tar
tar zxvf flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
tar zxvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
bunzip2 ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2; tar xvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tar
tar zxvf libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz

4. Create the codecs directory & import them
mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs/
mv essential-20061022/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/
chmod -R 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/

5. Install SVN/Ruby (Depends on OS, this is for RHEL/CentOS)
yum install subversion
yum install ruby
yum install ncurses-devel

6. Get the latest FFMPEG/MPlayer from the subversion
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

7. Compile LAME
cd ~/ffmpeg/lame-3.97
./configure
make
make install

8. Compile libOGG
cd ~/ffmpeg/libogg-1.1.3
./configure
make
make install

9. Compile libVorbis
cd ~/ffmpeg/libvorbis-1.1.2
./configure
make
make install

10. Compile flvtool2
cd ~/ffmpeg/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

11. Compile MPlayer
cd ~/ffmpeg/mplayer
./configure
make
make install

12. Compile FFMPEG
cd ~/ffmpeg/ffmpeg
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-libvorbis --disable-mmx --enable-shared
echo '#define HAVE_LRINTF 1' >> config.h
make
make install

13. Finalize the codec setups
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.50 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.50
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.51 /usr/lib/libavcodec.so.51
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavutil.so.49 /usr/lib/libavutil.so.49
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.51 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.51

14. Compile FFMPEG-PHP
cd ~/ffmpeg/ ffmpeg-php-0.5.0
phpize
./configure
make
make install

15. Install FFMPEG-PHP (make sure the php.ini path is correct.)
echo 'extension=/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/ no-debug-non-zts-20020429/ffmpeg.so' >> /usr/local/Zend/etc/php.ini

16. Restart Apache to load FFMPEG-PHP (Depends on OS, this is for RHEL/CentOS)
service httpd restart

17. Verify if it works
php -r 'phpinfo();' | grep ffmpeg

If you get a few lines such as
ffmpeg
ffmpeg support (ffmpeg-php) => enabled
ffmpeg-php version => 0.5.0
ffmpeg.allow_persistent => 0 => 0

Then everything is installed and working. FFMPEG, FFMPEG-PHP, MPlayer, MEncoder, flv2tool, LAME MP3 encoder & libOGG.