Imagine you hava list of jobs that are dependant on each other.
First job converts video from one format to another, second job should trigger if first job was successful and do some status updating. This is exactly a thing Task Spooler will help you with.
It will prevent simultaneous video conversions by queuing them to run one after another.

Downside is that it listens to port 80 and I haven’t found a way to change that port. This is a “bad” thing because most people have apache listening on port 80 too, so to restart apache you will need to kill all Task Spooler processes or you will get an error that goes something like this:
Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down.

I will probably play with it some more and try to build out of the box methods for callbacks…

After toying with fresh ffmpeg-php 0.6.0 I kept getting error:
Fatal error: failed to convert frame to gd image

Problem lies in broken function _php_avframe_to_gd_image in ffmpeg_frame.c, in the base ffmpeg-php package.
To fix this problem download this patch file and apply it to ffmpeg_frame.c like so:

cd /path/to/ffmpeg-php-0.6.0/
wget http://hazaah.com/download/ffmpeg_frame.c.patch
patch -p0 ffmpeg_frame.c < ffmpeg_frame.c.patch

Reinstall ffmpeg-php && restart apache.

Thats all.

I found numerous tutorials on this subject out there but they all failed me, but combination of them all was successful. So fallowing is made from 10 different tutorials.
And for all those who will ask why not just apt-get php5-ffmpeg, answer is so we can configure ffmpeg with libs and options we need.

Prepare

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install libjpeg-progs libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev libsdl1.2-dev php5-dev php5-cli php5-gd build-essential unzip

Download files

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20071007.tar.bz2
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17497/flvtool2-1.0.6.tgz
wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.6.0.tbz2
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/libvorbis-1.2.0.tar.gz
wget http://ftp.penguin.cz/pub/users/utx/amr/amrnb-7.0.0.2.tar.bz2
wget http://ftp.penguin.cz/pub/users/utx/amr/amrwb-7.0.0.3.tar.bz2
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/theora/libtheora-1.0beta3.tar.gz

Unpack packages

tar zxvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
tar zxvf libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf libvorbis-1.2.0.tar.gz
tar zxvf flvtool2-1.0.6.tgz
tar jxvf essential-20071007.tar.bz2
tar jxvf ffmpeg-php-0.6.0.tbz2
bzip2 -cd amrnb-7.0.0.2.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -
bzip2 -cd amrwb-7.0.0.3.tar.bz2 | tar xvf -
tar zxvf libtheora-1.0beta3.tar.gz

Install Ruby on Rails, subversion & ncurses

apt-get install subversion ruby libcurses-ruby

Fetch latest Mplayer and FFmpeg from trunk

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer
cd /usr/local/src/mplayer
svn update

Copy codecs

mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs
mv /usr/local/src/essential-20071007/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/
chmod -R 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/

Create TMP

mkdir /usr/local/src/tmp
chmod 777 /usr/local/src/tmp
export TMPDIR=/usr/local/src/tmp

Install lamemp3

cd /usr/local/src/lame-3.97
./configure
make && make install

Install libogg

cd /usr/local/src/libogg-1.1.3
./configure && make && make install

Install libvorbis

cd /usr/local/src/libvorbis-1.2.0
./configure && make && make install

Install flvtool2

cd /usr/local/src/flvtool2-1.0.6/
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

Install mplayer & mencoder

grab a snack

cd /usr/local/src/mplayer
./configure --enable-jpeg
make && make install

Install AMR

cd /usr/local/src/amrnb-7.0.0.2
./configure
make && make install

cd /usr/local/src/amrwb-7.0.0.3
./configure
make && make install

Install libtheora

cd /usr/local/src/libtheora-1.0beta3
./configure
make && make install

Install ffmpeg

cd /usr/local/src/ffmpeg/
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --disable-mmx --enable-shared --enable-libamr-nb --enable-libamr-wb --enable-nonfree --enable-libtheora

make
make install

Important: You will probably get errors such as: ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libavdevice.so.52: cannot open shared object file, or some other library. To solve this problem you must create symbolic links. Universal code would go something like this:

ln -s /usr/local/lib/[YOUR LIB NAME]/usr/lib/[YOUR LIB NAME]

So, if you get error for libavdevice.so.52 [YOUR LIB NAME] would be libavdevice.so.52.
Got it? Good, moving on…
Install ffmpeg-php

cd /usr/local/src/ffmpeg-php-0.6.0/
phpize
./configure --with-ffmpeg=/usr/local/ffmpeg
make
make install

echo 'extension=ffmpeg.so' >> /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

AWN doesn’t make permissions for config folder like it should, owner is root instead of you (the rightful owner). Quick fix is:

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /home/$USER/.config/awn

I am sure this will be fixed very soon, till then have fun.

Here’s a little script that should help you with that (and with similar tasks). Download.
Install:

gunzip unrarr.gz
sudo cp unrarr /usr/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/unrarr

Usage:

unrarr /path/to/folder

Edit:
To check rar files (through svf files) for consistency CVF package must be installed (cfv.sourceforge.net)

Will install fallowing: fuse-utils and libfuse2

When sshfs is installed:

$sudo mkdir /path/to/mount/point
$sudo chown your-username /path/to/mount/point
$sshfs ssh-username@ssh-server.com:/target/dir /path/to/mount/point

Thats it. To unmount just type

$sudo umount /path/to/mount/point