Hi to all of you. First of all I want to tell that I am a newbie at video encoding stuff. So there are a lot of things I don't know of and don't be aware of. Please be so kind and respect that when answering just because everyone needs to get started somehow. I really would love to know good places of RTFMs for ffmpeg-encoding stuff, if you have some stuff/links to enjoy! ;-) So reading is not the problem at all, mostly it's just about understanding the stuff... ;-) For now I tried to encode some videos in HD what most of the time worked out quite fine. Now that our kids got two ipods nano (5th gen) from us, I thought it might be useful to give them some sort of videos like the moonbear (in germany it's "The Mondb?r") and stuff like that. So I could convert a sample video extraction with XMedia recode (newest version) which plays nicely on the ipods. But as I don't want to do stuff with windows, I would love to do this encoding for the ipods with ffmpeg. In the meantime I compiled ffmpeg on my own Ubuntu 9.10 virtual machine. This is what I tried and what doesn't work at all and I have absolutely no clue why. Maybe you can help me?? --------------------------------------- root at nw-vmw-dec:/DATALINK/mediathek1/VideoDB-TRANSCODING4/Der-Mondbaer# ffmpeg -y -i Der-Mondbaer-02-Schatzgraeber.avi -f mp4 -acodec libfaac -ab 160k -ac 2 -aspect 16:9 -s 640x480 -vcodec libx264 -vpre ipod640 -b 1350k -bt 1350k -r 30.0 Der-Mondbaer-02-Schatzgraeber.mp4 FFmpeg version SVN-r21822, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 Fabrice Bellard, et al. built on Feb 14 2010 19:14:56 with gcc 4.4.1 configuration: --disable-ffplay --disable-ffserver --disable-network --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-avfilter --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-pthreads libavutil 50. 9. 0 / 50. 9. 0 libavcodec 52.54. 0 / 52.54. 0 libavformat 52.52. 0 / 52.52. 0 libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0 libavfilter 1.17. 0 / 1.17. 0 libswscale 0.10. 0 / 0.10. 0 libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0 Input #0, avi, from 'Der-Mondbaer-02-Schatzgraeber.avi': Duration: 00:12:12.00, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1209 kb/s Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 640x352 [PAR 1:1 DAR 20:11], 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 25 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: mp3, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 32 kb/s [libx264 @ 0x20a8600]broken ffmpeg default settings detected [libx264 @ 0x20a8600]use an encoding preset (vpre) Output #0, mp4, to 'Der-Mondbaer-02-Schatzgraeber.mp4': Stream #0.0: Video: libx264, yuv420p, 640x480 [PAR 4:3 DAR 16:9], q=2-31, 1350 kb/s, 90k tbn, 30 tbc Stream #0.1: Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 160 kb/s Stream mapping: Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1 Error while opening encoder for output stream #0.0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height root at nw-vmw-dec:/DATALINK/mediathek1/VideoDB-TRANSCODING4/Der-Mondbaer# --------------------------------------- Warm regards from germany, Michael