Question

I am using the following command to encode an AVI to an H264 video for use in an HTML5 video tag:

ffmpeg -y -i "test.avi" -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -vpre baseline -g 30 "out.mp4"

And this works just fine. But I also want to create a placeholder video (long story) from a single still image, so I do this:

ffmpeg -y -i "test.jpg" -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -vpre baseline -g 30 "out.mp4"

And this doesn’t work. What gives?

EDIT: After trying LordNeckbeards answer, here is my full output: http://pastebin.com/axhKpkLx

Answer 1

Example for a 10 second output:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -framerate 24 -i input.jpg -c:v libx264 -preset slow -tune stillimage -crf 24 -vf format=yuv420p -t 10 -movflags +faststart output.mp4

Same thing but with audio. The output duration will match the input audio duration:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -framerate 24 -i input.jpg -i audio.mp3 -c:v libx264 -preset slow -tune stillimage -crf 24 -vf format=yuv420p -c:a aac -shortest -movflags +faststart output.mp4

• -loop 1 loops the image input.

• -framerate sets the frame rate of the image input. Default is 25. Some players have issues with low frame rates so a value over 6 or so is recommended.

• -i input.jpg the input.

• -c:v libx264 the H.264 video encoder.

• -preset x264 encoding preset. Use the slowest one you can.

• -tune x264 tuning for various adjustments to fit specific situations.

• -crf for quality. A lower value results in higher quality. Use the highest value that still provides an acceptable quality to you. Default is 23.

• -vf format=yuv420p outputs the pixel format as yuv420p. This ensures the output uses a widely acceptable chroma sub-sampling scheme. Recommended for libx264 when encoding from images.

• -c:a aac the AAC audio encoder. If your input is already AAC or M4A then use -c:a copy instead to stream copy instead of re-encode.

• -t 10 (in the first example) makes a 10 second output. Needed because the image is looping indefinitely.

• -shortest (in the second example) makes the output the same duration as the shortest input. In this case it is the audio since the image is looping indefinitely.

• -movflags +faststart relocates the moov atom to the beginning of the file after encoding is finished. Allows playback to begin faster in progressive download playing; otherwise the whole video must be downloaded before playing.

• -profile:v main (optional) some devices can’t handle High profile.

See FFmpeg Wiki: H.264 for more info.