Okay, so I’ve been looking into how good ole youtube would work. The whole concept of video has been hideously complex on computers for a long time with the wide range of codecs (which are independent of the audio codecs), limited bandwidth and a multitude of encapsulating frameworks.

Thankfully the late Macromedia has stepped up to the plate with its flash video offering. This guarantees that anyone who has the flash player (most people on the earth) will have all that is required to support the playback of reasonable quality video at minuscule file sizes. Thus services like you-tube can soar, and so it has, recently being bought for billions of dollars by Google.

Finally we can do away with our AVIs, our Quicktimes and the stress of trying to find a common enough codec to use so that most people will get more than an empty box with a lone audio track.

So, how do we create these brilliant flash movies on the server-side? I decided to have a dig around and found this excellent guide that details how to do the whole thing using Open Source tools! Thank you to whoever managed to decipher the new Sorenson codec and write the FFmpeg plugin for it!

This is all very cool, the only piece of the puzzle that I’m missing is being able to track the progress of encoding a video. This would mean it can be done in the background without the user waiting for the page to appear for hours and reported on through a control panelly type setup. I might just have to give it all a go and see if I cant get FFmpeg to spit it out for me. Otherwise, I might have to resort to writing my own wrapper for the library (yuck). All good fun!

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