Hey guys,
Yes, this is certainly something we are working on. We had found many commercial tools to convert videos from different codes to streaming flash videos (.flv). However these tools are either very expensive, or won't work under Linux. Many were windows only and could thus not be used by the Newschoolers back-end.
However, I have however found a reasonably stable way to do the conversion through open source tools (mplayer + mencoder + codec packs + flvtool2). I have tested serveral of NS's videos and the conversion does seem to work pretty well!! Not only that, but it can all be scripted and the conversion only takes about 20 seconds for a 2 minute long video!!!
The challenge from here is to work out the kinks in the video conversion process and to then convert all of Newschooler's videos!
Video conversion from hundreds of different codecs is tricky and there will definetly be some older videos we will never be able to convert.
Even then, NS has 20,000 videos to convert! That is a HUGE number of videos to convert and test. We will likely have to setup a page where every NS member can get a random video from the lits in Flash format, and indicate wether the conversion worked or not.
This is something we are hoping to do by the end of the season, or for next year.
~Paul