ffmpeg 0.5

Upgraded ffmpeg to 0.5 and was amused to see that the x264 developers have actually put in place some defensive programming against ffmpeg brokeness.

[libx264 @ 0x8b7d8b0]broken ffmpeg default settings detected [libx264 @ 0x8b7d8b0]use an encoding preset (vpre)

This messages indicates that the best way to tune the output is to use one or more of the included presets, in my case located in /opt/local/share/ffmpeg/. The new iPhone/iPod encoding line therefore becomes:

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -threads 3 -async 5000 -i inputfile -cropleft 56 -cropright 56 -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 -crf 20 -vpre default -vpre baseline -f mp4 -s 480x320 -r 25 -aspect 480:320 -level 30 -metadata title="Title" filename.mp4

Note the use of two presets, the first to select the default set of parameters, the second to disallow features not found in "baseline" H.264 as the iPhone and iPod touch only support baseline H.264, not main.

Posted by Ian Donaldson