encoding

The other day we were faced with a dilemma: one of our clients needed to be able to upload daily (and sometimes hourly) videos for posting on their site - videos that were encoded as MPEGs, but needed to be FLVs. Until recently, we had been encoding them manually, using command-line FFMpeg, which, while being fairly flexible, was a slow, unreliable, processor-intensive action.

Jason did some hunting, and found an article on TechCrunch about this new web-based encoding service called Hey!Watch.

Holy crap, it's awesome.

Marseilles-based Hey!Watch has developed a system that offloads the encoding work normally done by your local machine onto their servers, virtually eliminating server load due to vid encoding.

Besides being able to convert vids from virtually -any- format to any other format, they've also got fantastic integration via APIs, browser plugins and Amazon's S3(!).

Cool stuff, right? I thought so, too, at least in theory. Thing was, I had never done anything with HTTP_Request, ever, so it was time to dive in. I learn best when thrown into things, anyway. The end result wasn't too shabby, and since I figure some of you out there might be in the same boat I was in at some point, here's the code I used:

--Pastebin seems to be down, I'll post it up as soon as pastebin comes back--

In the meantime, you can see it here: http://wilcoding.xs4all.nl/Wilco/Pastecode/4545/showpaste.aspx