Media Mover 2.x has been slowly creeping along for the last bunch of months and is starting to approach an alpha state. One of the cool things about Media Mover 2 is that the architecture has been rewritten from the ground up. Now there are three main concepts - files that Media Move knows about, configurations which are a collection of steps, and steps which are settings for some kind of action or process that is done to a file. However, they all have lives of their own which means you can do some neat things with them.
Let's imagine that you have a module that needs to do some kind of file processing that Media Mover already supports. You can define a step- that is, a set of settings - much like a view - in code in your module. You can then invoke it simply:
$step = media_mover_api_step_get($step_id);
$step->run($file);
This allows for running conversions dynamically- changing settings for a step based on varying criteria, further abstracts Media Mover from the node context, and so on. Why would you want something like this? Imagine you have a document that you need to customize for users based on some data in a cck field. You can take this data, parse it in to a text file and then use Media Mover's Antiword module to generate a unique PDF for the end user. Another use case is in AJAX callbacks to display altered images or watermarks or what have you...
