How can you say, take a set of JPGs and convert it into a movie file with PHP? I'm not too picky on the format but something like avi would be preferred, I assume there'd be a way to do this but do you guys know of any?
There's no functions in php to do want you want directly. However, you can use the exec() or system() commands to execute an external program to do the conversion for you. You should look at both mencoder and ffmpeg as I think either one can turn jpegs into avi's
I agree with above, video encoding is a complex procedure, I don't think php alone can handle it. Yes, either mencoder or ffmpeg can do the job, you will need vps or dedicated server for this.
Get ffmpeg and using exec("ffmpeg etc etc"); Provided that you're on a *nix system. Regards, Dennis M.