Hello,
I would like to encode a series of still JPEGs into an h.264 video clip. I looked at ffmpeg with x.264 installed but that gave me weird errors:

first when I tried this: ffmpeg -f image2 -i %12d.jpg test.mpg

I got:
then when I tried this: ffmpeg -f image2 -i * ../a.mpg

I got:
My images are definitely not trucnated or corrupted and I have no idea why it wouldn't open test.mpg. I'm running both commands from command line logged in as a root in a directory that has all permissions necessary.

Has anyone achieved this with other tools? Any suggestions?

Just managed to convert those stills into an AVI video clip by using jpegtoavi:

jpegtoavi -f 6 640 480 * > test.avi

Did the job nicely but unfortunately there's no compression and 208 pictures that normally take up 11 MB are now converted into an AVI clip that takes up 9.8 MB. Anyone knows how to add any compression to it now? Preferably H.264 but anything will do at the moment.

Ok, I just launched this:

ffmpeg -r 6 -i test.avi -vcodec libx264 -y -f h264 test1.mp4

onto my AVI clip that I got from the series of those stills. That produced some output-- seemingly a compressed video but unfortunately VideoLan player doesn't play it-- just displays a black box for some time and that's it.

Any ideas?

Ok, this command does it:

ffmpeg -i test.avi -vcodec libx264 test3.mp4

test3.mp4 comes out as a neat, compressed playable video clip. Seems like I've been ranting here on my own, huh? Anyway, I got my series of still images compressed to h.264. Hope this helps to someone else too.

Did you make any more progress on this? I'm running down this path just now, but don't want to use jpeg2avi (my source is not always jpg & I'd rather not go through two level of lossy conversions).

I was just experimenting with Handbrake for Linux. Seems promising, but there's still the intermediate step of creating some sort of avi that it can understand, then convert *that* to the h264 mp4.

Any other, better ways?

The usual way is listed here:
http://ffmpeg.org/faq.html#SEC14

Ok I did a cut and paste of every command I could find to use ffmpeg to turn my jpegs into video and got the same error as at the top. I do not want to use another program and then turn around and do another encode afterwards. Could I be missing a codec or something. Is there a package I need to have before I compiled ffmpeg in order to work with jpegs? If so please any help would be greatly appreciated.

If the file already exists (previous failure) you need to include -y which lets you overwrite the output file.

ffmpeg is not infallable, but you can pipe it's output to other programs.

ffmpeg -f image2 -loop_input -r 30000/1001 -i picture%03d.png -sameq -aspect 16:9 -t 00:00:10.000 -pix_fmt yuv420p -f yuv4mpegpipe - | yuvscaler -v 0 -n n -M BICUBIC -O SIZE_720x480 | mpeg2enc -f 8 -a 3 -F 4 -b 7000 -o dvd_movie.m2v

You can also pipe it back into ffmpeg, these extra steps/apps sometimes help to overcome issues with quirky inputs/outputs. You might also try the -intra option. And a lot of the above can be ommited or done with ffmpeg. And probably not the most efficient method.

A good long while ago, ffmpeg (or mencoder) was little picky about the input picture format. I used imagemagick to reconvert them to "-depth 8" and it then liked the input. The originals were generated in povray. I haven't had to repeat that extra step for a long time now. But it might be related to some of the issues you're having. Some formats have set output frame rates, you seemed to be missing any change to the input frame rate for the output format, which might be one cause of your issue(s). x264 also has a number of presets available, check out the -vpre option and the stuff in /usr/share/ffmpeg/*. They should be put after -vcodec as ffmpeg is a bit order picky. Also the defaults as they were are 25fps and 200kbps. Without a -r or -b or -sameq or -qscale option, you might not get desireable results.

HTH

One gotcha (and I've not done *any* research on how to get around it) is that it appears ffmpeg wants frame 1 to be labeled frame 1, so the sequence:

frame.0256.jpg
frame.0257.jpg
frame.0258.jpg

would not work. They would need to be renumbered to frames 0001,0002,and 0003. You will get the above error message if they are not renumbered.

Also, I've found that with less than 20 or so frames, you want to force single threaded or the video will be truncated.