How to “fork” a video conversion process into background, in php?

Question

I have a batch flash upload script, that uploads video files to a dir. Simple. After the upload completes, it creates a mysql record for that file, and moves on to the next

Answer 1

It will do the trick but it seems like an unmanageable idea. If you're just going to launch and never look back, things might go wrong really fast.

How about just scheduling a script that runs every few minutes and polls anything that is still in queue. Do you have access to cron?