Video

Today I learned the hard way about some magic ffmpeg does when encoding with the libx264 codec. Apparently, when you use a "-preset" higher than the "medium" default, the H.264 level gets upped to 5.0. This makes my Samsung TV UE-40F6340 SSXZG refuse to play the resulting file.

To work around this problem, explicitly specify "-level 4.1" (which is the highest supported level as per the Samsung Manual). Of course, the frame rate continues to be limited to 30 fps in progressive mode.

These are the settings I use now:

(...) -c:0 libx264 -preset slower -level 4.1 -g 25 -bf 2

I specify "-g 25" to make the video more easily seekable and "-bf 2" to facilitate YouTube uploads (2 consecutive B-Frames is YouTube's recommendation).