Run a ffmpeg process in the background

Question

I am wanting to use ffmpeg to convert video to .flv in php. Currently I have this working, but it hangs the browser until the file is uploaded and is finished. I have been

Answer 1

You don't need to write a separate php script to do this (Though you may want to later if you implement some sort of queuing system).

You're almost there. The only problem is, the shell_exec() call blocks to wait for the return of the shell. You can avoid this if you redirect all output from the command in the shell to wither a file or /dev/null and background the task (with the & operator). So your code would become:

//Run linux command in background and return the PID created by the OS
function run_in_background($Command, $Priority = 0)
{
    if($Priority) {
        shell_exec("nohup nice -n $Priority $Command 2> /dev/null > /dev/null &");
    } else {
        shell_exec("nohup $Command 2> /dev/null > /dev/null &");
    }
}

I don't think there is any way to retrieve the PID, unfortunately.