been there, after tens of experiments like that and using stuff like pandastream I ended up using zencoder.com. reasons?

1) its FAST(are you seriously explect someone will wait 5-40 mins on your site while vid is encoding?). 2) ffmpeg doesnt support some weird non-open source codecs that users keep sending to our site. 3)it just works. always. and takes much less than 100 lines to hook.

So, i didn't get what exactly $600 piece author referring to. i dont know any sw that costs $600 and can be replaced by these 100 lines.