ffmpeg usage to encode a video to H264 codec format

Question

I have a   mp4 video file MPEG4 video codec  and I am trying to convert this to a H264 video codec format raw h 264 format  using ffmpeg on Linux Version - FFmpeg version SVN-r0 5 1-4 0 5 1-1ubuntu1  Copyright  c  2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard   using command line as shown below    ffmpeg -i input  mp4 output h264    but I get an error saying -   Unsupported codec for output stream  0 0   Then when i try this option   ffmpeg -i input  mp4 -formats h264 output h264    it still does not work  and gives -  Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate  59 94  5994 100  - gt  29 97  30000 1001  Input  0  mov mp4 m4a 3gp 3g2 mj2  from  Rapture mp4     Duration  00 02 06 44  start  0 000000  bitrate  26574 kb s     Stream  0 0 eng   Video  h264  yuv420p  1920x1080  29 97 tbr  29 97 tbn  59 94 tbc     Stream  0 1 eng   Audio  aac  48000 Hz  stereo  s16   And then it prints out help on the formats which we get when we do ffmpeg -formats  When I checked the help  ffmpeg -formats  I see below information related to H264 file format and codec    File format     DE h264            raw H 264 video format  Codecs   D V D  h264         H 264   AVC   MPEG-4 AVC   MPEG-4 part 10   My questions     How can I convert the video to a H264 encoded video  raw H264 video format  When I do ffmpeg -formats  I see many acronyms for the codecs supported  I see many acronyms before the codec name type such as - D V D S E A  what do they stand for  How to use the ffmpeg options -vcodec and -formats

User · Accepted Answer

I believe you have libx264 installed and configured with ffmpeg to convert video to h264    Then you can try with -vcodec libx264    The -format option is for showing available formats  this is not a conversion option I think

User · Answer

I used these options to convert to the H 264 AAC  mp4 format for    HTML5 playback  I think it may help other guys with this problem in    some way    ffmpeg -i input flv -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec aac output mp4     UPDATE  As  LordNeckbeard mentioned  the previous line will produce MPEG-4 Part 2  back in 2012 that worked somehow  I don t remember understand why   Use the libx264 encoder to produce the proper video with H 264 AAC  To test the output file you can just drag it to a browser window and it should playback just fine   ffmpeg -i input flv -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac output mp4

User · Answer

I have a Centos 5 system that I wasn t able to get this working on   So I built a new Fedora 17 system  actually a VM in VMware   and followed the steps at the ffmpeg site to build the latest and greatest ffmpeg     I took some shortcuts - I skipped all the yum erase commands  added freshrpms according to their instructions   wget http   ftp freshrpms net pub freshrpms fedora linux 9 freshrpms-release freshrpms-release-1 1-1 fc noarch rpm rpm -ivh rpmfusion-free-release-stable noarch rpm   Then I loaded the stuff that was already readily available   yum install lame libogg libtheora libvorbis lame-devel libtheora-devel   Afterwards  I only built the following from scratch   libvpx  vo-aacenc-0 1 2 x264  yasm-1 2 0 ffmpeg  Then this command encoded with no problems  the audio was already in AAC  so I didn t recode it    ffmpeg -i input mov -c v libx264 -preset slow -crf 22 -c a copy output mp4   The result looks just as good as the original to me  and is about 1 4 of the size

User · Answer

C  Program Files  x86  ffmpegX86shared bin ffmpeg exe  -y -i  C  testfile ts  -an -vcodec libx264 -g 75 -keyint min 12 -vb 4000k -vprofile high -level 40 -s 1920x1080 -y -threads 0 -r 25  C  testfile h264    The above worked for me on a Windows machine using a FFmpeg Win32 shared build by Kyle Schwarz  The build was compiled on  Feb 22 2013  at  01 09 53  Note that -an defines that audio should be skipped

User · Answer

I believe that by now the above answers are outdated  or at least unclear  so here s my little go at it  I tried compiling ffmpeg with the option --enable-encoders libx264 and it will give no error but it won t enable anything  I can t seem to find where I found that suggestion    Anyways step-by-step  first you must compile libx264 yourself because repository version is outdated     wget ftp   ftp videolan org pub x264 snapshots last x264 tar bz2   tar --bzip2 -xvf last x264 tar bz2   cd x264-snapshot-XXXXXXXX-XXXX      configure   make   sudo make install   And then get and compile ffmpeg with libx264 enabled  I m using the latest release which is  Happiness    wget http   ffmpeg org releases ffmpeg-0 11 2 tar bz2 tar --bzip2 -xvf ffmpeg-0 11 2 tar bz2 cd ffmpeg-0 11 2    configure --enable-libx264 --enable-gpl make sudo install   Now finally you have the libx264 codec to encode  to check it you may run  ffmpeg -codecs   grep h264   and you ll see the options you have were the first D means decoding and the first E means encoding

[ffmpeg] ffmpeg usage to encode a video to H264 codec format

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