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

Answer 1

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