Immediate "Cron run exceeded the time limit and was aborted."

Issue Summary

I have two issues, trying to use the paid transcoding service:

1. cron gives me

warning: curl_setopt_array(): CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in modules/storage_api/storage_api.module on line 1501.

(see [784634-4]). I'm not sure whether CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION is really needed or not, but I got rid of the warning by commenting out that option (line 1492).

2. However, either way, I keep getting an immediate

Cron run exceeded the time limit and was aborted.

when I try to run cron.php. The browser gets "ERROR 500: Internal Server Error." This doesn't happen after 4 minutes or so but immediately! cron ran just fine before installing Blue Droplet Video.

Storage is set to "Local Storage". The file that I'm trying to transcode is a 62MB DVD-ROM .vob file. My upload limit is 8MB, so I copied the file to the server's httpdocs directory instead.

Trying to specify an absolute path such as /srv/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/clip.vob gives me a WSOD. /clip.vob gives me "File not found." and clip.vob gives me the WSOD. Specifying the URL as http://example.com/clip.vob finally does the trick. I'm puzzled though: should the file be copied to files/storage? It's not.

I have files showing up in files/tmp though with timestamps of the cron runs. When I still had CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, the files were left with 0 size. After commenting out CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, they're now 62MB, one for each cron run.

The Apache error log shows

PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function hash_file() in modules/storage_api.module on line 1185
PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 63954945 bytes) in Unknown on line 0

for each cron run.

Being able to use the transcoder at bluedroplet.com manually would be quite a relief...