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I believe that by now the above answers are outdated (or at least unclear) so here's my little go at it.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Anyways step-by-step, first you must compile libx264 yourself because repository version is outdated: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