Video Conversion (a la youtube)

Question

So we were going to make a website allowing users to upload video. The website is going to be in PHP/MySQL. Are there any converters out there available for PHP to convert a video from a given format to flash to display on the web page to play?

Basically we would have a file on the server in say .avi format, or quicktime format. How do I grab it from the server, convert it to flash and display it on the php page to play?

Also, does can I use the video capabilities of HTML5 with PHP to make any of this easier?

Answer 1

What I have seen is encoding to flash on the server uses FFMPEG, Which must be installed onto the hosting server (some hosts specialize in this market). I've also looked for an open source encoder PHP or Perl, and not found one. I believe the problem is flash has not been open source and that stopped people because of licensing issues.