How can I convert an m4v video to a widely viewable format using ffmpeg?

I have a m4v video generated by iMovie. I want to use ffmpeg to generate a widely viewable video on Windows. I cannot assume that the viewer will have VLC (or any other sophisticated viewer). It needs to be viewed by what is a default installation of Windows 7.

How do I do this? I tried ffmpeg -i video.m4v video.avi, and that did not directly work for my users. They say they get audio, but no video.

1 Answer

Try the following command:

ffmpeg -i video.m4v -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:a aac -strict experimental \
-movflags +faststart video.mp4

But note, that this will re-encode your video file.