Server-side video conversion and compression

Question

I want to provide an automatic video-converter for my CMS-customers. They should be able to upload their "untouched" video-files (MP4, VMV, AVI, ...) and my server compresses and converts it to a Web-friendly MP4-file (exactly like YouTube makes it).

The result is clear:

• Web-friendly MP4-format
• Compressed to tolerable file size

So I'm looking for a PHP-API or Linux-shell-script to realise this.

Is there a easy way to handle this?

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Edit: YouTube-embedded videos are not a solution for me.

Answer 1

Have a look at http://www.ffmpeg.org/ it's pretty much the go-to library for this sort of thing.

I found a PHP driver for it here that looks interesting but I've not tried it. Still, it's easy enough to run the shell commands directly from PHP if needed.