ffmpeg is available from Fink, but you'll have to enable unstable.

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Thanks for the Mac ffmepg install procedure. I'd love to know the best ffmpeg settings to convert a MPEG2 file (.mpg) from my PVR (BeyondTV) to a .m4v (MPEG4) that can be shared in iTunes. Does anyone know the setting Apple uses?

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Don't know about that, but I'll bet VisualHub or iSquint will do it. It handled my ReplayTV MPEG2 files just fine (and they're funky, but it figured it out.)

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VisualHub is a great interface to ffmpeg... much cleaner than ffmpegX, and far more sane than the craziness of trying to do it at the commandline.

Also, VisualHub includes a "publish to Tivo" plugin. Yeay, finally I can get video content on to my tivo! Yeay. Between that, and the recently produced "Tivodecode", I now have two-way video with my tivo.

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I have a Miglia TVMini HD, and I've found that the MPEG2 streams often have dropped packets. Last I checked, ffmpeg does not handle MPEG-TS properly, so it is not really useful for transcoding your PVR data to MPEG4 format; unless the tele signal is nearly flawless, the audio and video will not sync. I've found that the Mencoder features of MPlayer do (since October, I think) handle "TS" transport streams properly now, resulting in an efficient, fast, transcode to MPEG4.

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Another way to go about it may be to add the path to the executable to your $PATH environment variable, or symlink to /usr/local/bin/ and just leave the application binary in place.

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This might be obvious but why not use ffmpegX? The standard settings for 640x iPod use are great. If you use the 320x setting, set Qmin to 3 and Qmax to 28. Also set ME function to Multi-Hexagon or Exhaustive (the latter if you don't mind the extra time it will take). You'll end up with about as good an H264 video as is possible without using two-pass.

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Two things in this world aren't overrated: Macintosh and Lemon Meringue Pie.

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ffmpeg is avaiable on darwinports.

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thanks Rob. but I have a problem. In leopard there seems to be no /usr/local/bin, just lib and share.
can I put it in lib?

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Thanks for this article. What I would like to add here is that some functions of FFmpeg and its commands Changing the Frame Rate: Syntax: ffmpeg -i inputfile -r 5 outputfile. Extracting Audio From The Video: Syntax: ffmpeg -i input.avi -vn -ar 44100 -ac 2 -ab 192 -f mp3 audio.mp3 The -vn option holds the key to this command. This option is used when we want to disable the video recording Converting Images To Videos: Suppose you have a collection of images named as say image1.jpg,image2.jpg and you want to view them in the video format.You can do this by running this command on the shell. Syntax: ffmpeg -f image2 -i image%d.jpg output.mpg. To know more visit: Ubuntumanual.org

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