Before anyone reading this gets puzzled and wonders why the mobile discussion jumps up in the middle of the thread... I do have two mobile activated sites as you can see in my signature. Bplex was just trying to get me to be clearer in my questions and descriptions and I was mixing up the two sites in my observations.

I also run a private high school site for my classroom where we upload videos. The files are converted to mp4 and stored as such. A high school football game can take upwards of 500 mb of files. A half hour clip can take that long to convert on the server and looking at the cpanel Resource Usage shows it hitting 100% for a significant amount of time.

I can trick the system by uploading a 1 minute video and let it convert. Then I ftp a 30 minute mp4 video to the storage directory and rename it with the original cryptic filename. Change a couple of entries in the database with myPhp and all is well. This saves server processing and lets me do the work at my desk. BUT there has to be a way to just tell vshare that if the file is mp4 already then assume it is already set up for fast-start and to just pass it through.

As I said it is a private site and the students have specific instructions on file settings before uploading. So if they do it wrong it is their marks that suffer.

The original poster asked the same question. I have no idea if the general public is uploading to his site but if so then this idea is bad as most mp4 files will need to download completely before starting to play.