Despite the recent love I gave it, Handbrake has let me down. The latest version segfaults on every job I give it. So I’ve had to find a different way to get RubyConf2008 onto my Ipod. I decided to take another look at ffmpeg’s terrifying command line options.

Confreaks have put the RubyConf 2008 videos online here. To convert the larger 960x468 videos to a format playable on your Ipod using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i ruby-19-what-to-expect-large.mp4 -cropleft 480  \
-vcodec h264 -b 150k -bufsize 244 -maxrate 768k \
-s 480x368 -bf 0 -level 13 -f mp4 -acodec aac -ar 48000 \
-ab 64 ruby19.mp4 

Confreaks videos have two halves: the slides and the presenter. The cropleft option removes the left hand half of the video, in this case the presenter, leaving just the slides.

If you want to test out your options you can tell ffmpeg to only process a few frames:

-vframes 2000