I have a client who wants to set up a web site to accept videos in various formats, convert them into one format, and then have them streamed. I'm pretty experienced with PHP/MySQL/Javascript, but I have almost no experience when it comes to videos.

The videos are going to relate to various products, and will be less than 2 minutes and 30 seconds long. They do not need to be high-quality, but it does need to be very simple for end users, both those uploading videos, and those viewing them.

Any advice on how feasible this would be, and on how to accomplish it, would be much appreciated. The client's budget to get it set up is $1500, but he is willing to spend a lot more for a good solution if necessary.

You would use mencoder to do something like that. It can convert every format MPlayer plays (which is pretty much everything, for all intents and purposes) into whatever codec you specify.

I suppose it wouldn't be too difficult to do, just save the video upload on the server some place, run your mencoder command against it (you would want to experiment with that first, to find the ideal settings for the output video), and then delete the old video.

Though I can't say that I am experienced enough with things like PHP to give you a practical example of it, but the theory is simple enough.

Thanks MS3FGX, for pointing me in the right direction. I'll go ahead and do some research on mencoder. Much appreciated!

What you can use is ffmpeg to convert any video format.
eg.Just check the man page on how to convert different types of ext.