FFMpeg can be tricky and a bit intimidating for the faint of heart. In fact, I remember spending a half day encoding movies until I found a setting I liked. To save some of you the same trouble I went through, here is the exact encoding I use for my MP4 files.
ffmpeg -i myMovie.mov -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -vpre slowfirstpass -b 1000k -bt 1000k -threads 0 myMovie.mp4
The line above takes the “myMovie.mov” file and encodes it to “myMovie.mp4″ using h.264 as it’s encoding. You must have FFMpeg installed for this to work and the directions for getting and installing ffmpeg are beyond my discussion here.
Remember that MP4 is a container format which Flash Player 10 can read. This is similar to the FLV file format that were used to. However, the difference comes from the payload in which an MP4 uses h.264 as compared to sorenson and On2 VP6 in the FLV container. H.264 makes for a much smaller encoding and provides for a brilliant video experience with 720p HD video and 1280p.