On the fly video recoding on a Linux server

Is it possible and how should I look to obtain more info?

[AndieR]

Hello,

One of my clients has a video sharing service site and basically he'd like for the system to detect what format the user is uploading (one of the three allowed such as real player / quick etc) and automatically recode it into the two other formats on the fly after the upload thus saving it as copies...

I'm not sure this is possible and haven't been able to find much when I googled for these topics I'm afraid.

Any help would be greatly apreciated!

Regards,
Andie

[MattyMoose]

One of the possibilities that springs to mind right away:

Use file(8) to determine the filetype that's been uploaded. Result looks something like this:

file 116read.rm 
116read.rm: RealMedia file

Then use mencoder [mplayerhq.hu] to re-encode the video to another format. (see http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/mencoder.html [mplayerhq.hu] for more details).
Something like:

mencoder uploadedmovie.wmv -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -oac copy -o movie.avi

You can also probably use other players/encoders that are out there.

[AndieR]

Hello,

That's great! Thank you for the advise, it's just what i was looking for.

Regards,
Andie