Thanks for all the tips. What I'm doing is making a simple one step "video blogger / video email" script for linux using Tk and mplayer. The script works fine making and previewing the mpeg, and I have code to upload it(~500k to 1 meg) automatically to a website showing progress, but when emailing the script, it just sits there doing the upload with no indication of how far along it has gone. Maybe I'll just live with it being a video blogger, since most people don't want big email attachments anyways.