In an interesting, but not entirely useful, development, ffmpeg has been compiled to run on the iPhone and iPod touch. Visit wickedpsyched.net for more details.

While the iPhone is not the most powerful device available to do video conversion, it is sure cool to know that it can be used for such.

(via tuaw.com)

If you are using ffmpeg to create DVD-compliant mpeg-2 files, there is something important to keep in mind. This is the -maxrate option.

I have found that without this option, there is the occasional bitrate spike that will exceed the 9Mbps limit for DVD’s. On some DVD players, this will present itself as a skip in the audio followed by audio and video coming out of synchronization.

When encoding for DVD, be sure to use -maxrate 7500k to keep all video spikes within spec. You might be able raise the max above 7500k and still be within spec, but this is the setting I use.

Have you ever wanted to make mp3’s out of your videos (e.g. music videos) so you can load the audio onto your iPod or listen to it in your favorite music player?

This simple Applescript droplet will do just that. Drop your video onto the Video to mp3.app icon, type in the desired bitrate, and it will immediately start converting the first audio track to a mp3. Give it a try. It works with many different video formats including VOB.

Video to mp3.app (video_to_mp3.zip)

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Do you have a lengthy video that you are encoding for DVD? Is the length long enough that you have to reduce the bitrate in order to make it fit? Here is a trick that will theoretically give you better quality at the same bitrate for the same duration of video.

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If you want to watch a PAL movie in an NTSC DVD player, you are out of luck. There are DVD players out there that will play both PAL and NTSC discs, and, in fact, I have one of those. The problem with that solution is that see flickering lines and some jagged lines when watching PAL discs. This could just be a flaw of my cheap DVD player.

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I know there are solutions out there for video transcoding such as the awesome ffmpegX, but I wanted to make my own solution. I drop my source video onto this droplet, and with just a few button clicks, I can convert almost any video to an mpeg2 that is DVD compliant. What I did here was make an AppleScript droplet which is an application bundle and contains the binaries, ffmpeg, pulldown, and mplex. Pulldown and mplex are necessary if you are starting with a 23.98fps source and want to keep it at that rate.

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