I know, I'm non-stop with these recently aren't I...
OK, we have a site where people can upload videos. These then need to be transcoded to the Flash-compatible FLV format. I don't want users to have to wait around while this happens, so I want to start the transcoding on it's own thread, and just beaver away in the background, long after the page has been sent to the user.
Problem is, I can't bloody do it. If I use a BackgroundWorker it doesn't *actually* process in the background- the page still waits for it to complete (it just does some funny stuff like get to PreRender while it waits).
Does anyone know of a foolproof way to launch something in a separate thread? It doesn't need to return any values. My thoughts:
- Wrap what I'm doing in an .EXE of it's own. Somehow launch this from the CodeBehind in a way that means it doesn't wait for it to complete
- Make the code a separate page, and then do some kind of Asynchronous WebRequest on that URL from the *other* URL.
...any ideas? Don't say "make a service to do the trancoding"- I'd love to but I don't have access to the Windows machine, just FTP.