[FFmpeg-user] 2-pass ENcoding with mpeg (switching from mencoder)

[James Board]

I'm trying to convert from mencoder to ffmpeg, at Carl's suggestion.  I want
to do 2-pass encoding.  I saw this command (for pass 1) in an ffmpeg user
guide and tried this:

    ffmpeg -y -i AI_kerndeint_ffvhuff_trim.avi -an -vcodec libx264 -vpre fast_firstpass -b 2000k -bt 2000k -vf "crop=1440:1080:240:0,scale=640:480" -pass 1 -threads 0 /dev/null

This was the error

    /usr/local/share/ffmpeg/libx264-fast_firstpass.ffpreset: Invalid option or argument: 'directpred=1', parsed as 'directpred' = '1'


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I saw this in another post on how to do 2-pass encoding:

    /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i AI_kerndeint_ffvhuff_trim.avi -c:v libx264 -preset medium -b:v 10m -pass 1 -an -f mp4 /dev/null
    /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i AI_kerndeint_ffvhuff_trim.avi -c:v libx264 -preset medium -b:v 10m -pass 2 -an OUT.mp4

There was no error on the first command.  The error on the second was
    Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

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So, I want to use ffmpeg instead of mencoder for doing 2-pass mpeg4 encoding.
What's wrong with the above commands, and what's the correct way to do this?

Thank You