convert using ffmpeg without exec

Question

I have Windows XP, Apache, PHP 5.3 and ffmpeg working fine. I need to convert flv to avi or vice versa without using the exec() command. Is this possible?

Answer 1

There is a version of ffmpeg for PHP:

http://ffmpeg-php.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

You will need to exec somewhere. If you can not do it on your host computer another solution is to have another system download convert and then upload the converted video and repeat. A more idea solution would be post to another online account convert and download. Between those options the first would be scalable.

Neither of these solutions are off the shelf that I know about. They would need to be created.

I believe the reason the format is not processed in an open PHP or Perl is because of potential licensing issues. FLV is not an open source format. So the perl and php frameworks make a exec request to process the video using ffmpeg