<p>Part of a new product I have been assigned to work on involves server-side conversion of the 'common' video formats to something that Flash can play.</p>

<p>As far as I know, my only option is to convert to FLV. I have been giving ffmpeg a go around, but I'm finding a few WMV files that come out with garbled sound (I've tried playing with the audio rates).</p>

<p>Are there any other 'good' CLI converters for Linux? Or are there other video formats that Flash can play?</p>

Flash can play the following formats:
```
```
FLV with AAC or MP3 audio, and FLV1 (Sorenson Spark H.263), VP6, or H.264 video.
MP4 with AAC or MP3 audio, and H.264 video (mp4s must be hinted with qt-faststart or mp4box).
```
```
ffmpeg is an overall good conversion utility; mencoder works better with obscure and proprietary formats (due to the w32codecs binary decoder package) but its muxing is rather suboptimal (read: often totally broken).  One solution might be to encode H.264 with x264 through mencoder, and then mux separately with mp4box.
As a developer of x264 (and avid user of flash for online video playback), I've had quite a bit of experience in this kind of stuff, so if you want more assistance I'm also available on Freenode IRC on #x264, #ffmpeg, and #mplayer.