h.264 encoding with ffmpeg

[James Board]

I'm trying to figure out how to convert some MPEG2 files to H.264 MPEG4 with ffmpeg. I read the documentation, and it seems like these (and a few other things) should work:

    ffmpeg -i infile.mpg outfile.h264
    ffmpeg -i infile.mpg -vcodec h264 outfile.mpg

But it doesn't. The error message is

    Unsupported codec for output stream #0.0

or

    Unknown encoder 'h264'

The documentation says that h264 is supported, so I must be doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong? Do I have to install the h.264 encoders manually?

[Seve]

Hello:
Make sure you have x264-libs installed. The rpm package is available via yum.

Seve

[James Board]

I installed the x264 libs with yum:

yum install "*264*"

And it made no difference when I attempted to convert an MPEG2 file to h264. I still received the same error messages.

[James Board]

I tried a fresh checkout of ffmpeg and explicitly added h264 support during the configure:

./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libx264

But this produced an error:

ERROR: libx264 version must be >= 0.65.

The problem is that "yum update x264-libs" installs version 0.61.

How do people that don't ask questions generally solve these problems?

[SuperNu]

Try

ffmpeg -i infile.mpg -vcodec libx264 -acodec libfaac outfile.mp4

--SN