It’s not tough to set up a video-encoding facility in Rails. Here’s a quick run-through with some code examples.
Video encoding is a long-running process and you don’t want to have to wait for the video encode to finish before the web-request can complete. One strategy to avoid having extremely long web-requests is to have Rails hand off the encoding job to BackgroundRb, a job-scheduling server which does long-running work in a separate thread. The same thing could be accomplished in most other web-languages by spawning a new thread and doing the work, but BackgroundRb gives us a bit of extra love: if multiple users upload a whole bunch of videos at the same time, BackgroundRb will queue them up and work on them in sequence so the CPU doesn’t go through the roof.
