UPDATE: As of May 13th, 2012 I use something “MiroConverter” to do this for me. It’s has an easy to use GUI and ends up using FFMpeg anyway…
Get MiroConverter.
I use something called ffmpeg2theora. It works like a charm, the only downside is there is no GUI, so you have to do everything from the command line. However, as other video encoders are unreliable and unstable this thing just works!
One should always use a couple different video sources for the html5 video tag, like:
<video>
<source src="example-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
<source src="example-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
</video>
For browser compatability reasons. In fact, if you use the two formats below you will cover 99% of the new browser compatibility issues out there.
Installation
To use it, simply go here, download the right version of the softaware and unzip the package, it comes in a convenient installer so follow the instructions after opening.
Usage
It’s so simple to use, simple open up your terminal and type:
ffmpeg2theora video.m4v
And it will transcode the video automatically and place new file in the same folder as the .mp4 version.
Super simple.
There’s also a great discussion of the different video transcoding software out there here.
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the post.
When you want to convert video-files to .ogv and .webm on a mac. there’s another solution that was very useful to me:
Just install the latest version of firefox, open the browser and go to:
http://firefogg.org/make/
You have a link there to the firefogg plugin. Once installed, you can convert your video-files very easy to decent ogv or webm files.
Nice! I haven’t seen this before. Thanks for the link!
love it
wow, excellent… just was i was looking for. thanks a million for this. 🙂
Thanks! Very simple to use.
Can you help with code to do the reverse please – i.e. convert ogv to mp4 or other?
FYI, if you use Hombrew you can install it using brew.
$ brew install ffmpeg2theora
Hey Mike…
Thanks for the tips
Just wondering what setting you use for Miro (when converting to .ogv)
I can’t seem to make it look like anything other than super low res poop (really low res) I think I have tried all the settings possible and am starting with a really nice 22mb .mp4 file and it keeps pooping out a less than 1mb .ogv file that obviously looks awful.
Any tips would be appreciated!
Thank you for your post. I’m familar with ffmpeg and this way really helps me.
But i know a litter about MiroConverter and what i use to change MP4 to OGV is Faasoft Video Converter for Mac.
From where I sit, it’s easy to use.
Very useful ! Thanks you guys 😉
You may try iDealshare VideoGo which is professional OGV Converter for Windows and Mac
Work as the OGV Decoder, iDealshare VideoGo can fast and batch convert OGV to almost all popular video formats like convert OGV to MP4, convert OGV to AVI, convert OGV to MKV, convert OGV to MPG, WMV, ASF, Apple ProRes, MOV, RM, DV, FLV, WebM, VOB, 3GP, TS and etc. It even supporting converting OGV video to audio format like convert OGV to MP3, OGG, WAV, WMA, M4A, FLAC, AC3, AAC and etc.
Work as the OGV Encoder, iDealshare VideoGo can easily create and encode OGV from other video formats including MP4, AVI, WMV, WTV, WebM, SWF, FLV, F4V, MOV, DV, AVCHD, MTS, MOD, TOD, MVI, MXF, DVR and etc.
Have you tried Avdshare?
It will show you a step by step guide on how to find and download the right ogv to mp4 videos as well as add ogv to MP4. In fact, this guide also applies to add subtitles to AVI, MKV, WTV, WMV, VOB, MPG, MOV, DV, FLV, WebM, OGV, and etc.
Thanks for this, I’ll try it out!
Both iDealshare VideoGo and Avdshare Video Converter works great to convert mp4 to ogv or ogv to mp4