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 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!