Video Rendering Server

[jamesfed]

Hi all,

As part of the schools digital media sections of IT the students have to capture and edit video – since the IT Teachers want to stick with XP Movie Maker (which I understand because of its simplicity for the year 7/8/9 students) we are constantly running into problems with video file formats not being supported.

Usually if a student had some video that couldn’t be edited I would stick it into SUPER and re render the video on my desktop PC however with the volume of video this can sometimes take quite a while.

As such I was thinking does anyone know of a way that I could get one of the servers to automatically render the video for me?

The way I see this working (or something similar)-

1. Student finds they can’t use video in movie maker
2. Student cops video file to a network shared folder
3. Every few minutes the server looks at that folder to see if there is anything in there
4. Server converts video and puts it in a ‘rendered videos’ network folder
5. Server deletes original video from folder (maybe even deletes the rendered video after a specific time period)

What would be even better is if this could also be done with music files to.

Just to be in the clear - I have very little knowledge of Linux/Command Line tools and would need a very clear guide.

Thanks,
James

[guns1inger]

You could script something that checks the folder and uses ffmpeg or mencoder to do the conversion. Relatively straight forward.

Procoder has watch folders for exactly this purpose. You designate a folder, it has a resident agent that detects anything being put into the folder and converts it automatically. Don't know of any free encoders that support the same concept.