Can i use just ffmpeg?

Question

I have a video sharing site, it uses phpmotion, i tried cliipbucket also, i didn't like any of the scripts, i decided to create my own script, using django and maybe pinax. the other 2 scripts, use ffmpeg, and many other stuff like ffmpeg-PHP, Mplayer, Mencoder, flv2tool, LAME MP3 Encoder, and Libog

i know that i won't need ffmpeg-php since i'm not gonna be using php, but do i really need those other things? can i just use ffmpeg to do all the work? i don't understand what the other stuff are used for.

Answer 1

Yes, you can use ffmpeg to do all the work, for all work that falls within the subset that ffmpeg supports "out of the box". You only need the other scripts if you want to optimise/do trickyness to the generated videos.

Also, NEVER run these scripts in the request/response cycle. Consider spawning a Celery task to do the encoding.

And Never save uploads to the server with user-defined names or name partials.

Answer 2

I'll advice you to use celery for scheduling encoding task. You can find some code example here: http://code.google.com/p/365video/ it's django project for video works with ffmpeg and celery. also can be plugged into pinax. Don't forget to use celery for video encoding tasks.