I've been tasked with creating some YouTube like functionality for a client's web site. I tried going the ffmpeg route but the hosting environment needs full trust. Right now, they are using Rackspace Cloud Sites, and of course, they are medium trust. They have been with them for about a year and a half and they absolutely love them.
Does anybody know of a way to programmatically convert videos to flv in a shared hosting medium trusted environment?
I don't know of a way to do it on the same server, but your client may want to look into offloading the encoding to another service (Amazon Web Services is the only example I can think of). This could also add the benefit of saving CPU time on their current server, as video encoding is a costly process.
Hopefully you can find a way to make this work.
I doubt you'll find a reliable solution for this in a shared or locked-down hosting environment due to the libraries that are most certainly required. Like jkap says, you should think about off-loading this to another place. If however, you were able to get ffmpeg working you might want to look into Xuggler. I have posted how to do the conversion in the shortest piece code (that i've seen) on this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2961645/converting-into-flv-using-java/3632395#3632395