How can I achieve the best overall FLV quality with FFMPEG?

Question

I\'m looking to accomplish the best quality FLV with the lowest file size. After all, isn\'t that everyone\'s goal? These videos will be streamed if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

I didn't have any luck with the options presented thus far - most of them had no effect on my input file, which was consistently producing poor-quality results - but the following worked very well indeed:

ffmpeg -qscale 4 -i infile.avi outfile.flv

Reduce the qscale value for better quality, increase it for a smaller file-size. From the docs:

-qscale n where n is a number from 1-31, with 1 being highest quality/largest filesize and 31 being the lowest quality/smallest filesize.

Tested on Mac OS X 10.6.8.