I did this a few weeks ago, but my wife told me tonight after she had dinner with one of her friends that her friend was curious how I did this, so I decided to blog about it.

A couple weeks ago I emailed HDC to see if there was a way that I could get the HDC sermon video in different formats so I could put it on my phone, iPod, AppleTV, or whatever media player I wanted. I didn't get a response so I figured I would just re-encode the video file they put up on the net, myself.

The toughest part in this whole deal was actually finding the file on the HDC media server. Normally you can just view the source of an HTML page to find the path to the Flash Video file, but in this case the video file is embedded in a flash object container, which doesn't allow you to actually see the path to the video, you only get to see where the container.swf file, that holds the video file, is located.

How I ended up finding the path to the video was by first finding the path to the audio file. I knew the the video file was flash video, so all I did once I found the audio file was change the extension from .mp3 to .flv.

How the heck did I find the audio file?

Well that was simple, click on the tab that says "Audio" in their fancy flash player, and then click the download button. Duh!

Note: I'm explaining how to do this on a Mac using Firefox, so if you're using Windows, sorry!

After clicking the "Download" button you'll be directed to the URL of the mp3 file. You won't be able to see the URL at first because their web site has removed the toolbars from the window that pops up for their media player. All you have to do to see the url is click the button at the top right of the window. Now you see the entire toolbar.

Copy the entire address to the mp3, and paste it in another browser window. At the end of the file change the extension from mp3 to flv. Voila!, you now can download the video file of the weekend sermon.

I got the file, NOW WHAT!

Patience young padawan. You can't do anything with this file unless you plan on posting it on your own web site. You probaby can't even open the file with any of the programs on your computer. What do we do with this chunk of binary data we downloaded? Glad you asked. Encode.

Re-encode the file to something you can use

This is where we get kind of geeky (As if I haven't already passed this point).

You have a couple options for encoding.

• You could download FFmpeg and install it on the spare Linux server you've got as part of your Server Farm in the hall way linen closet.

Ok, that's too geeky.

• You could use an online service like vixy.net to encode the file for you. Just enter in the url for the flash video file and hit start. And it's FREE!

Well, that's getting better, but this service doesn't always work. Sometimes the servers are too busy. What do you expect? You get what you pay for.

• Or you could use a service like HeyWatch!

I personally recommend HeyWatch!. It cost pennies to encode your video's and you can encode any video format (not just flv files) to any other video format. Plus, it's a lot faster to encode than vixy.net. Just encode your video to an .mp4 file format. I normally use the mp4 H264 format for high definition videos, but the flash file you get from HDC has already been compressed, so you won't get that quality of a picture after encoding.

Now you just need to get the file on your phone. That's a whole other subject, so I'll leave that for another time. If you have any questions on any of this, leave a comment below and I'll try to answer your questions the best I can.

Conclusion

Well, I hope I didn't get too geeky. Hopefully one day HDC will encode the files for us and provide download links so all you have to do is download the file and put the file on your phone. Until then, you have to jump through a couple hoops to get the sermon video on your phone. It'll be nice once HDC does encode the video's for us, we'll get a better quality picture for our mobile devices if the video is encoded from the HD file.