Video files conversion/transcoding Google App Engi

Question

I want to start a cloud computing project with the simple task to:

1. Receive uploaded video files
2. Do some transcoding / converting to them
3. Allow user to download / stream the generated file

I was thinking ffmpeg as an external command line tool integrated in a Java/Google App engine Application. Since it was fairly hard to be assured about the limitations of the framework, can someone tell me if this is feasible?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

You have to offload ffmpeg to an external server, like Amazon EC2 or Google Compute Engine.

At Google I/O this year, Google actually demonstrated the exact same project you want to make in a presentation titled Managing Google Compute Engine Virtual Machines Through Google App Engine, albeit in Python.

Some code is already in the slides, but as mentioned during the presentation, Google wanted to make the source files for the project available. I don't know if they have done so yet. You could probably email the authors and ask.