This was going to be a highminded post about fairy tales and morphology but instead i am going to record my trials and trivails of running ffmpeg on amazon's map-reduce. So - what i am doing is adding a cached directory of ffmpeg to every map-reduce computer i use...

I am compressing video in the cloud via amazon's EC2/mapreduce/s3/etc... I am using map/reduce for this although it is really not a reduce problem only a map problem and not even that - I just need to spawn a bunch of ffmpeg processes.... The problem is I cant map/reduce...