We are working on an online mobile video app. The videos we want to play on mobile phones are being generated by a server, as there can be dynamic content in the server (based on user input).

Now for iPhone we would like to play the video in the best possible resolution based on the connection speed at the time of downloading the movie. This can be done using reference movies. However, because our videos are being generated on the fly, we need to generate this reference movie on the fly as well.

Is there a way to generate reference movies on the fly on a Linux server using some command line tool, PHP or Java? Or on a DOS server maybe?

Any help will be much appreciated.