Server Side Flash Transcoding

[bigandy]

I'm creating a community website for my Uni's TV station, which includes, among many others, the possiblity for users to upload their own films.

I have decided to use Flash Video for the site. The problem I'm having is finding something with the capability of automating batch transcoding.. I'm shifting through manuals and the suchlike, but all I want to know is if there's something available (priced either free or nearly free as the station is skint), or am I going to have to implement this myself?

What I need is an app or service that can run on either MacOS, or Fedora Core, (even Windows if it comes to it), that automatically picks new videos out of a specified directory and converts them to Flash. Thumbnail creation would be fantastic too.

 

[timmillwood]

so you want somthing that makes flash videos like on YouTube from normal videos.

That would be cool, wondered how that was done!

 

[bigandy]

Basically, yeah.

I've got a shortlist of two products that can do it:

• On2 Flix (a snip at $2,500)
• Autodesk Cleaner XL (only $600ish)

But I'm looking mainly at ffmpeg because apparently it's scriptable. Although that's more hassle than I wanted

 

[timmillwood]

Whoo! that seems expensive, we need an open source version

 

[bigandy]

ffmpeg is free and open source.

there's also a rather good open source alternative to Flash Media Server - Red5.