Convert Videos for IPhone on Linux using Avidemux

Recently I downloaded some amazing video lectures from MIT Open Courseware program, an great initiative by MIT to avail top level online education to the rest of us who won't dream of studying there (although I always feel free to dream), I was specially interested in the Introduction To Algorithms course by Prof. Charles Leiserson

I planned to have all the videos loaded on my IPhone to have some brain food for the road, finding all videos in mp4, I was hoping that they would be compatible with IPhone, but unfortunately ITunes refused to sync the videos with a message:

"file" was not copied to the IPhone because it can not be played on the IPhone"

I searched and found many blogs and articles going in details about the complex specification of video and audio mux supported by IPhone, such info is informative but won't help you much to actually get it to work, when I googled around I found long lists of software products that would help you convert your videos in one click, most of the software is running on Windows and Mac, and I did tried a couple of those on windows and the result was a garbled video image or cluttered sound.

I learned that Avidemux 2.4.4, a free video editor on Linux can manipulate almost all video formats, but using trial and error to try to get the right combination of Video and Audio Encoders, bit rate, partition decision, ... wasn't a user friendly experience at all, not even close to a human one

Here is the right settings that works with Avidemux:

1. Set video encoder to MPEG-4 AVC (x264)


2. Click Configure
   
   
   
   1. Motion tab: set partition decision to 4
   
   
   2. Misc tab: uncheck CABAC
   
   
   3. Partition and Frames tab:
      
      
      
      1. Uncheck 8x8 transform
      
      
      2. B-Frames, set max. Consecutive to 0
      
      
      
      
   
   
   
   


3. Click Filters (Under Video on the left) and enable MPlayer resize filter, set target size to 480x320


4. Set Audio Encoder to AAC (FAAC)


5. Set Format to MP4


6. Save your file with extension .mp4

That's it, it will take a while to finish, you are looking at 10 minutes to convert a 1 hour 250MB video in incompatible mp4 format (as the ones I got off the MIT OCW website) to IPhone friendly mp4, and Avidemux doesn't allow multiple selection, so you would have to do one file at a time (although you can run multiple instances of the application and challenge your CPU) ... It would have been nice to find out about command line arguments (if any) for Avidemux to be able to wirte a little script to do the hard work overnight for me