Converting .avi to .mp4 for play on iPod/iPhone using FFMPEG
Recently, I wanted to convert some of my video files to play on my wife’s iPhone. After some quick google searching I found a shell command using ffmpeg that looked like it would get the job done. As stated in the article entering the command quickly told me that there were a number of codecs that were missing and needed to be installed. Unfortunately getting the command to work wasn’t quite as simple as just installing the missing codecs. I ended up having to install ffmpeg from source in order to get things to work. Here’s the steps I needed to take. These worked for my Kubuntu distro, not sure how they would work with other distros.
Download the right codecs:
sudo apt-get install libfaac-dev libfaad-dev
Download ffmpeg from source:
sudo apt-get source ffmpeg
Switch to the directory containing the ffmpeg source code
cd ffmpeg-*
Compile from source:
sudo ./configure –enable nonfree –enable libfaac
sudo make install
Convert the file:
ffmpeg -i input.avi -acodec libfaac -ab 128kb -vcodec mpeg4 -mbd 2 -flags +4mv -trellis 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -s 320×240 output.mp4
To get the converted files onto the iPhone I just had to transfer them to my wife’s Windows machine, import the files into iTunes and sync.
h/t Tech Exposures
