I’m attempting to create a simple video conversion app which accepts any video format and then formats it into the desired format “automagically” all while attempting to keep aspect ratio and sound quality consistent. I do a ton of video converting and it would be handy for me to just shoot it off to a server to do all the converting while I work on other projects.
After some research it looks like FFMPEG is my best bet …
Anyone have any thoughts? Is there a open source project that has already done this / code that I might have missed or looked over?
I donot recommend hosting such a service yourself. I think you should be able to find ‘off-the-shelf’ cloud provider with ‘instant’ transcoding machines on-demand.
You are not looking for application hosting, such as GAE, you are looking for P aaS (Platform as a Service), such as Azure, AWS EC2; Here is a good comparison:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/64727/windows-azure-vs-amazon-ec2-vs-google-app-engine (note the answer by a GAE developer).
Basically, PaaS should be able to deliver you computing units (where you are specifically expected to utilize the full CPU (etc) potential of the instance – after that, you just terminate the instance; you pay by the hour, and you scale up as required; You can equally good run 1 small instance for a month, or run 60 large instances for a few hours and work out the financial equation).
I do remember seeing pre-existing cloud images precisely for doing video transcoding – don’t remember where exactly, but look around at rightscale.com (which works with Rackspace and EC2 IIRC, perhaps more these days).