I want to set up a little webserver for searching and displaying my videos. Those videos have many different formats and codecs. The problem is, that HTML5 Video does not support all of my videos and I don't want to convert all of them to a suitable format. I can't use DivX Webplayer, because it isn't supported in Chrome and Firefox (NPAPI). The webserver shall run on a raspberry pi and only be local. I'm looking for a way to display those videos in the browser. I hope you understand my question and thanks in advance for the answers !
This is one case where I think you might just want to spawn a process outside of the Web-page/server, to handle the video playback. You can use exec() etc in the PHP code to execute an external program, and giving it the path to the video should start it playing said video immediately.
mplayer is a great alternative in this case, as it's light weight, CLI-based, and support just about anything you can shake a stick at.
Note that you might want to set the DISPLAY property when starting mplayer, or set up some remote, in order to actually control the playback.
This won't give you the videos in a browser, but if this is a requirement then you need to look into transcoding. mencoder and/or avisynth are the two best options here, assuming the Rasberry's hardware is sufficient for the job.