How to provide video streaming option for different formats on website

Question

In my website users can upload different video formats and i need to provide streaming for those formats (for example : mkv, avi, mp4, 3gp, wmv), but on web only mp4 format can be played by flash players.

My videos are hosted on amazon s3 server while my webserver is on different location, what i do is receive stream from s3 and transmit to client, so what i need is to convert the video format to mp4 on the fly

So, is there any possibility to perform this functionality ( i am using asp.net mvc webapi as streaming service )

Any sort of help is appreciable...

Answer 1

You should convert your videos upon uploading, before making them available. Unless you're serving a couple of users, streaming with live conversion would require some serious CPU power (try to run 200 video encoders with ffmpeg on the same time, and see if you get more than 1FPS), so this solution would not be scalable. At the same time, once the video is converted to MPEG4, it doesn't matter how many users watch it.