Run the command-line tool (using shell_exec() for example) in the background and continue with the web script execution, periodically refreshing the status page, showing the current progress.What you want to do is to separate the command-line tool's long processing from your web script execution, to make your script more responsive. That being said, the worst thing you could do is to run a command-line tool (like ffmpeg) from your web script and wait for it to finish the processing to be able to deliver the result back to the waiting online user (the exception to this are small/fast tools whose execution times are too small to notice). Because if they get bored waiting, they'll just navigate off to another, more responsive (usually your competitor's) web site. Web pages are designed to execute quickly, so that people, browsing your web site, don't have to wait too much for the response. Invoking command-line tools from PHP scripts Choosing a model The idea can be applied to other web scripting languages too. It will also show some usage examples to make things more clear. This article will try to point out all the important things you need to know when using FFmpeg from within PHP web scripts.

Invoking command-line tools from PHP scripts.

Php ffmpeg install