Patent ID: 7681122

Claim:
A system for managing contemporaneous conversions of a plurality of files uploaded to the system by a plurality of users from a plurality of user computers, the system comprising: a memory, a web server adapted to receive a file uploaded by a user over a computer network store the received file in the memory, receive a converted version of the file from the memory, and transmit the converted version to the user computer for displaying to the user, a conversion task distribution manager having a request queue containing a request entry for each received file for which conversion has not been completed and a task queue containing at least one conversion task entry for each request entry in the request queue, a plurality of file format conversion applications, and a plurality of graphical processors, each graphical processor being operatively connected to the distribution manager, the memory, and a conversion application and adapted to receive a conversion task from the distribution manager, retrieve the file associated with the conversion task from the memory, control a conversion application to create a converted version of the file, and store the converted version in the memory.