natively compiling ffmpeg, x264, mplayer on mac (with builtin x264 and webm encoding)

May 28, 2011 tracey pooh

2 minutes read

i’m very pleased that after years of hacks here and there, all three heads of the current codebases pretty well build natively on mac (snow leopard) for

x264
ffmpeg
mplayer

here, i’m making sure that i compile in static version of libvpx (Webm) and libx264 (h.264) video packages so that the ffmpeg can easily make hiqh quality h.246 and webm transcoded videos.

https://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh

So we can make nice (2 pass video) ~768 kb/sec 640×480 derivatives like so (alter -r .. as appropriate):

make WebM

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset  \
  -vf scale=640:480  -r 20  -threads 2  -map_meta_data -1:0  -pass 1  \
  -an  tmp.webm

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset  \
  -vf scale=640:480  -r 20  -threads 2  -map_meta_data -1:0  -pass 2  \
  -acodec libvorbis -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.webm

mv tmp.webm 'camels.webm'

make h.264

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset  \
  -vf scale=640:480  -r 20  -threads 2  -map_meta_data -1:0  -pass 1  \
  -an  tmp.mp4

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset  \
  -vf scale=640:480  -r 20  -threads 2  -map_meta_data -1:0  -pass 2  \
  -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.mp4

qt-faststart tmp.mp4 'camels.mp4'

our preset files:

https://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libvpx-360p.ffpreset

https://archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libx264-IA.ffpreset

Nice things about the h.264 derivative:

plays on all iphones and ipads
browser video tag and/or flash plugin compatible
starts immediately, seeks immediately even before entire video is downloaded

hope this may be useful!

Say something

Comments

x

22/06/2011

Thanks for sharing your encoding params.

x

22/06/2011

Check out the improved python version of qtfaststart on github too.

https://github.com/danielgtaylor/qtfaststart

tracey pooh

23/06/2011

thanks for the tip.
i did check w/ the original author and his site at
http://multimedia.cx/eggs/improving-qt-faststart/ where he seems to suggest/prefer the bundled source w/ ffmpeg.

it seems most of the issues people have had with the C aspect of qt-faststart relate to 32bit vs 64bit compiling — which we don’t really have to worry about in our setup when compiling from ffmpeg as instructed. (and having been “raised on C”, i don’t have any major issues w/ C vs. python.

was there something compelling otherwise about the python variant you liked?

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