Web Based Video Conversion

Question

I have run into a challenge with a clients video streaming demands.

Recently we setup a basic PHP script that lists all the MP4 files in a directory and creates a link; once you click the link, it uses the HTML 5 video tag to stream the MP4.

My issue is the client now wants to be able to upload files from various formats to the library of videos.

What I was wondering before I advise him that this is not feasible is if there if any way to have a web based render program running on the webserver. It is a windows machine running IIS 8.5.

Any help would be appreciated in solving this problem.

Answer 1

You can check file compatibility using something like mediainfo or ffmpeg -i . If the video is in a format that will not play using the video tag, you must transcode it. Depending on volume you may be able to do it on the server, but a transcode can take A LOT of CPU. To solve that you can create a transcode farm, or better yet use a transcoding service like zencoder. Then pass the expense on to the client.