Thanks for the help. vShare support was able to get it installed, I have no idea what they did that was different than what I was doing but it's working.

I'm giving 2.8Beta a try again and I still get a parse error during video conversion with both the old and new mencoder code in the video_converstion.php. I issued a support ticket and am waiting to hear back again.

Is anyone else trying 2.8 and having any problems?