I spent last 10 days working on a more reliable solution for streaming videos. 

With some external help, it has been implemented on this site:   a similar setup as youtube for instance, using lighttpd with its module h264 

We get a bandwitch reduction and moreover the possibility to seek in the video's timeline, giving a lot more confort to users, especially with videos that are over 40 minutes average.

The system is running for few days now and it s seems to be okay.

I will look now at optimizing  again the quality and maybe doing custom conversion settings depending of the input file.

3 weeks after moving to this huge server, pretty expensive for me btw...  things are getting done. traffic has been increasing a lot last 2 weeks. the site is really taking off with some big sites now linking directly to here. 

The faster server probably convinced more users to come on here with a response time that has decrease at least 5 times compared to the celeron. 

With this quad core, I can now fully work on video conversion and test more settings. Before it was taking around 3h30 to convert a 360mb files,  with same settings it will take 20min now and this also a main reason to traffic increase, since videos are up on here before anywhere else.