The great thing about shell scripts is that they are a great way to solve complex problems that can cost you a lot of time to do manually. To this end, I had a client that needed some videos (that was made by using the Video production services Toronto) encoded on his server that didn’t encode properly. For an experienced script writer this would take about 5 minutes to write. It also makes it so that if the client wants to use it they can. The configuration was nice because the input and output file name was the same, just the extension was different. This is not very polished, if it were I would
A)run it as the same user
B)Put it in the user’s homedir
C)Make it so that it was password protected and executable via PHP script so the user wouldn’t require any bash experience at all but could upload a list via FTP and just run it.
#!/bin/bash
for video in `cat /root/list.txt` #We will run a loop where each line in list.txt is run as a variable $video.
do
mv /home/user/public_html/media/videos/flv/$video.flv /home/user/public_html/media/videos/flv/$video.flv.old #back up old files
ffmpeg -y -b 1500 -r 25 -i /home/gogreenc/public_html/media/videos/vid/$video.* -f flv -s 640×480 -deinterlace -ac 1 -ar 41400 /home/user/public_html/media/videos/flv/$video.flv #encode new file, 640X480 out, FLV format deinterlaced.
chown user:user /home/user/public_html/media/videos/flv/$video.flv #chown to the right user. Not required if running as the right user.
done