Recipe given on the wiki for making an mp4 under Linux consistently fails with "Could not find codec parameters"

[GoogleCodeExporter]

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1.Attempt to use the recipe given on the gource wiki for making an mp4 with 
ffmpeg from gource under Linux.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

Expected output is the mp4. Instead, all suggested variants of the ffmpeg 
command fail with "Could not find codec parameters".

What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?

ffmpeg SVN-r0.5.1-4:0.5.1-1ubuntu1 as shipped with Ubuntu 10.04.

Please provide any additional information below.

I understand that this is not a bug in gource itself.  Still, if you're going 
to supply a recipe, it ought to actually work. Or at least have better advice 
on how to troubleshoot failures.

Original issue reported on code.google.com by EricRaym...@gmail.com on 24 Dec 2010 at 2:05

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I've updated it to reflect what I understand is the current perpetually moving 
target of ffmpeg command line parameters for setting presets.

Original comment by acaudw...@gmail.com on 19 Jan 2011 at 12:02

• Changed state: Done

[GoogleCodeExporter]

It is failing for me too. Is there another way than using vcodec ppm because 
from a quick google search I get the impression this is associated with all 
kinds of issues. 

Is there another way of making video? This way looks like a lot of hard work.

Original comment by onno.van...@gmail.com on 3 Feb 2011 at 7:47

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Hi. I think you will probably find if you read the complete error message that 
your ffmpeg doesn't have libx264 support.

This thread talks about various ways to get ffmpeg with libx64 on ubuntu:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1117283

Or you could use a different codec. Eg mpeg (though the quality wont look as 
good):

gource -o - | ffmpeg -y -b 3000K -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i - gource.mpg

Original comment by acaudw...@gmail.com on 7 Feb 2011 at 2:04