ajit verghese

How to Download & Edit Videos from Qik

(image courtesy of http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com)

Two weeks ago I attended the 2009 Babson Forum on Entrepreneurship & Innovation where I had the chance to attend many great panels and hear several wonderful keynote speakers.

I recorded and streamed the Corporate Entrepreneurship panel via Qik.com on my jailbroken T-Mobile iPhone.

The panel featured keynotes and Q&A by Mark Atkins, CEO of Invention Machine (Babson MBA alum)  & Anand Vengurlekar, Managing Director of Stoic Brand Consultancy. I recorded both keynotes in one large file with the assumption that I would be able to download the video from Qik.com and edit the file to my liking. Bad assumption on my part.

I spent a portion of my day trying to download the videos - all my usual tricks didn’t work, including the always-reliable Keepvid.com. Apparently there used to be a ‘download link’ but it is not working according to the powers that be within Qik.com.

I finally stumbled on this post which gave me the beginnings of a workaround.

You can go to your RSS feed - http://qik.com/username/latest-videos. You have to enter your own username in that url to download your videos. However, at the moment only public videos can be downloaded through this RSS feed

I went to http://qik.com/averghese/latest-videos and was given an RSS list of videos in flv format. I quickly renamed and saved the flv file to my desktop and opened it up with VLC - the greatest open source video player that plays everything. The video played perfectly. I then opened up FFMPEGx, the greatest OS X video converter and tried to convert the video from the FLV format to any iMovie compatible format.

No luck.

I assumed that the video itself may have had a corrupted header, so tried to fix it by using FLVMIDI and injecting meta data into the header. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to make a difference to FFMPEGx or Sorenson Squeeze and I couldn’t convert the FLV to any other format.

A lot of research, and command line hacking ensued. Not very fun.

The solution ended up being using www.zamzar.com - an online video conversion site - which allowed me to upload my FLV file and then have it be automagically converted and then emailed to the fake Mailinator address I provided.

So I finally have a great video in .mp4 format that I am able to edit and modify. I’ll post both the videos later - but I now know how to deal with editing Qik.com videos post event. Perhaps I should have inserted a <geeking out> warning at the top of the post.

</geeking out>