ffmpeg usage to encode a video to H264 codec format

~~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

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...

I believe that by now the above answers are outdated (or at least unclear) so here's my little go at it.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Anyways step-by-step, first you must compile libx264 yourself because repository version is outdated: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

"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.

ffmpeg usage to encode a video to H264 codec format

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