Hello all,

At the Yale Center for Language Study we often have to encode batches of
digital media: MOVs, MP3s, AVIs, WMVs, etc. Some of these (especially
the videos!) take up a lot of computational resources, leaving any staff
workstation chugging along at a snail's pace. To alleviate this I wrote
a Perl script based on FFMPEG that allows any of our staff members to
drag the media to a folder on one of our servers where the files will be
automatically converted and placed in an outbox (er, out folder). I
figured since many of us are in the same situation it would be good to
share.

A couple of highlights:

	* It can read and write a variety of codecs and formats. Some of them
have to be compiled into FFMPEG separately, but almost everything is
supported and it should be able to convert very nearly any media thrown
at it (the only exception I've found so far is video files with more
than one video stream embedded in them).
	* It can email a designated list of users when a job is completed, as
well as the same list of users plus a separate list of admins if a job
fails.
	* Options can be given on a per-file basis by placing a special text
file alongside the media file to be converted.
	* Source files can be either kept (and moved to a "processed"
directory) or deleted automatically upon successful conversion

The web page explaining installation and customization can be found at
http://cls.yale.edu/page.asp?file=2/455 (apologies for the somewhat
unmemorable URL). The script can be run on OS X, Linux, or Windows,
although Windows users will be missing the email functionality.

I hope this proves useful to somebody else. I welcome any comments or
improvements to the script.

Cheers,
Chris Meyer
Programmer/Analyst
Yale Center for Language Study


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