create/edit videofiles with php

hello, i'm rather new to php, but have quite some programming experience in different langiuages. i'm working on an interactive installation that generates small movies, that are uoploaded to a server. and i want two things to happen; in one situation i need to encode the smal clips in the right format, and copy them to a streaming server, in the other situation i want those small clips to be stiched together on the server side, before being encoded in the appropreate format and copied to the a streaming server i've got multiple of those interactive installations, that communicate, but they don't have the resources to de all the work themselves.. also they don't have the bandwidth to act as a server.. but the recoding/not recording time-proportions are more than enough to keep up with uploading recorded movies.. so i want the server to do the rest and i've got the idea that php should be capable of doing this... but the only docs i find aree about creating Quicktime reference movies. i'd prefer anything that's compatible with Quicktime- or Darwin streaming servers, but any other suggestions are welcome too.. anyone? thanks arri