Posted by yossarian
A bunch of us have begun working on a new codebase for Indymedia, based on CakePHP. I’m not exactly Captain PHP, so there’s going to be a bit of a learning curve for me, but we’ll see how it goes.
One of the things I am interested in setting up is some kind of FLV video conversion system for the new CMS. There’s a nice pleasant-looking PHP library to deal with the FFmpeg video conversion utility on the server side (is anybody in the Rails world noticing this?), so here’s my experience installing it on Ubuntu.
Posted by yossarian
It’s not tough to set up a video-encoding facility in Rails. Here’s a quick run-through with some code examples.
Video encoding is a long-running process and you don’t want to have to wait for the video encode to finish before the web-request can complete. One strategy to avoid having extremely long web-requests is to have Rails hand off the encoding job to BackgroundRb, a job-scheduling server which does long-running work in a separate thread. The same thing could be accomplished in most other web-languages by spawning a new thread and doing the work, but BackgroundRb gives us a bit of extra love: if multiple users upload a whole bunch of videos at the same time, BackgroundRb will queue them up and work on them in sequence so the CPU doesn’t go through the roof.
