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I'm completely happy with my webhosting, it's just that I need to do one little thing they won't allow, and that's run an instance of Sox to convert about 30 mp3s to ogg files, in various directories, a couple of times a week, to be done automatically in response to the detection of the upload of an mp3. Probably looking at a minute of server time over the whole week. I've had unhelpful suggestions on other forums like "why not leave your home PC on 24 hours a day and then use all your isp bandwidth to do this", which doesn't work for me. I know that I can host files on, say, Amazon S3, but is there something similar for my needs? All it would need to do would be: wget/ftp the mp3 files, convert them to ogg, ftp the files back to my hosting.

Of course, all this wouldn't be needed if there was such a thing as a compiled binary of Sox (or any mp3>ogg converter) for Centos which I could upload without needing root access, but I've given up asking that one, but always open to suggestions!

talkingnews
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Funny you mention S3, because Amazon offers computing instances on-demand as well through their EC2 platform. You just pay for the time your instances are running. You could create a system image with the software you need, and when you have files to convert, fire it up, upload the files, let it do its business, download the results, then shut it down until you need it again.

Justin Scott
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    wonder if there is going to be an issue of copyrighted material being place on ec2 platform? Note that I'm not sure if your even doing copyrighted material just wondering out load. – tony roth Jun 10 '10 at 18:03
  • jeez wish this thing had a spell checker! – tony roth Jun 10 '10 at 19:07
  • I doubt Amazon cares what you do with the EC2 instances as long as it's within their terms of service. If you're processing copyrighted material in some way I doubt they care as long as you're not using their S3 hosting to distribute it without the proper license. – Justin Scott Jun 10 '10 at 19:08
  • Wow - that was easy. Sort of. I've got a bit of a learning curve, but with an hour's time, I'd signed up, got a small-instance going, found a site with info getting the gcc compiler, and nearly had it. Was getting compile errors like below, but I guess a read of the manual might help. It looks like there are "community build" AMIs too. Best I get on the Amazon forums for an ask! Anyway, this looks good. Thanks stats.c: In function 'bit_depth': stats.c:135: warning: negative integer implicitly converted to unsigned type make[1]: *** [libsox_la-mp3.lo] Error 1 make: *** [all-recursive] Error – talkingnews Jun 10 '10 at 20:03
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You can easily use a SaaS Cloud based service such as:

You pay per audio/video minute, GB or monthly, depending of the service

Nota that in Zencoder the price of audio-only is 1/4 of video.

Ariel Patschiki
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This is my simple suggestion -

  1. Set up Ubuntu 12.04 server on Amazon EC2 ( a micro instance is more than enough )
  2. Install SOX ( Try this guide http://quadloops.com/installing-sox-in-ubuntu-12-04-and-working-with-ogg-and-vorbis-formats/ )
  3. Set up FTP server ( Try this guide http://quadloops.com/installing-up-ftp-server-in-amazon-ec2-ubuntu-server-12-04/ )

Then you can FTP files back and forth and run the sox script.

Manu
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