Converting uploaded videos to .flv and having them added to my website

I plan to open a smaller and more specialised Youtube like site where users ca开发者_开发问答n upload their videos in a variety of formats and it will be converted to .FLV, and then posted on the website.

Most of the code I can handle myself, but I wanted to get some feedback on the uploading and converting stage of this. I'm planning to have the converting done on a separate server, independent of the one hosting the site. How would I go about converting the videos?

I checked out ffmpeg, would this be the best option to use? I want the videos in both high and low quality so it would be preferable to choose the bitrate.

Thanks.

Yes, ffmpeg would be the best option. It's simplest and most versatile.

Take a look at videopress.com - the video sharing service for wordpress.com. The entire solution is open source and uses ffmpeg to transcode video into multiple formats for embedding in websites.

You can access the code at http://code.trac.wordpress.org/

You should be able to either use this out of the box or customise if for your particular project.

You might also find something like Panda (http://pandastream.com) useful. It's an open source video encoding service.