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 *********************************************** LLTI is a service of IALLT, the International Association for Language Learning (http://iallt.org/), and The Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning (http://www.languageconsortium.org/). Join IALLT at http://iallt.org. Otmar Foelsche, LLTI-Editor ([log in to unmask]) ***********************************************