[FFmpeg-user] transcoding downloads from hulu

[Jeroen Roeper]

On Sat, 2012-06-02 at 20:28 +0000, freeslkr wrote:
> I've used https://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos to download
> videos from hulu.com.  They play well on VLC et al on my linux
> machine, but not on my WD TV Live.  There, the audio plays at
> a normal rate, but the video plays at something like double-speed.
> (I'm assuming this is some nonsense on hulu's part to discourage
> downloads, and that the WD TV Live refuses to work around it.)
> 
> I naively tried `ffmpeg -i tvshow.flv tvshow.mp4` to fix the problem.
> The audio and video are now synced at normal speed, but the resulting
> video is grainy and is unwatchable on the TV.  VLC reports the
> resolution (720x400) and frame rate (23.97) are unchanged from the
> original.
> 
> Will someone help me figure out the ffmpeg options I need to use to
> keep the video quality?  Or, is there a better way to accomplish
> getting the video to play at normal speed on the WD TV Live?

Try copying audio and video from the source file with:

ffmpeg -i tvshow.flv -vcodec copy -acodec copy tvshow.mp4

That should preserve source quality and just remux into an mp4 file.

Jeroen.