Panda, an open source project, will let any site owner willing to do a little coding and integration work to allow user video uploads and playback. Think YouTube in a box.

The software itself is free and will run on Amazon Web Services EC2, S3 and SimpleDB. You’ll have to pay for the Amazon services, but this is a nice step forward from a variety of existing paid services out there like Zencoder, SesameVault and Hey!Watch. Panda handles all aspects of uploading, transcoding and streaming, handing things off to a Flash player like JW FLV Player by default.

New Bamboo, a UK Rails consulting startup, is behind the project.