mp4tools - free tools to easily make mp4 files under Linux

Overview

mp4tools are a set of scripts to encode Audio and Video in Isomedia (aka MP4) format
mp4tools uses opensources programs as backends like mencoder, MP4Box, xvid, x264
and its quality is very good.
There are presets for most common devices like Sony PSP, Apple iPod, Nokia S60 phones,
so you haven't to go in the jungle of encoding options, firmware bugs, unsupported configurations
common in all embedded devices.
mp4tools hot functions are:

support for embedded devices
direct rip from DVD
autocrop of black borders to have a bigger visual
audio peak normalization to make audio sound louder, useful on devices with poor speakers

Quality

mp4tools quality is good since it uses x264 (the best h.264 encoder ever) or
xvid (the best mpeg4 encoder ever).
Here there are some video samples, so you can have a look before installing
It's the Ocean's 13 official trailer (resolutions are the ones before autocropping)

Note: you need Flash Player 9.0.60 or above to play the samples: Click here to download it from Adobe

PC, Max quality ([email protected]) 7.8 MB Download
iPod ([email protected]) 3.6 MB View Download
PSP ([email protected]) 4.4 MB View Download
3gp ([email protected]) 1.6 MB Download
Nokia S60 ([email protected]) 3.2 MB Download

And this is a song encoded with aacplusenc at a very low bitrate

HE-AAC+v2 (44100Hz [email protected]) 1.1 MB

Download

mp4tools consist of 3 archives which can be downloaded separately:

The shell scripts: mp4tools_0.6.8.tar.gz
aacplusenc, the AAC+ encoder: aacplusenc_0.17.5.tar.gz
amrenc, the AMR encoder: amrenc_0.5.3.tar.gz

Install

Extract all the archives and run in each subdir
make install
Read the mp4tools README to know about dependencies you have to met

Ubuntu packages

There are Ubuntu packages for all the above tools, you just have to use this repository by
either editing /etc/apt/sources.list by hand or adding it to Synaptic or Adept

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/teknoraver/ubuntu maverick main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/teknoraver/ubuntu maverick main

and then run:

apt-get install mp4tools

Usage

After installing you will have two type of scripts, some named mk* and other named dvd2*
For example, mkipod encodes a video file to the ipod format, while dvd2ipod rips a DVD into the same format
The included scripts are:

Script	Description
mk3gp	encodes a standard 3gp file
mks60	encodes an high quality 3gp file (may not play on older phones)
mkamr	encodes an AMR file (ringtone)
mkmp4	encodes an highest quality H.264 Video file, for PC playback
mkipod	encodes a movie for the Apple iPod
mkpsp	encodes a movie for the Sony PSP
dvd23gp	rips a DVD to a standard 3gp file
dvd2s60	rips a DVD to an high quality 3gp file
dvd2psp	rips a DVD to a movie for the Sony PSP
dvd2ipod	rips a DVD to a movie for the Apple iPod

Additionally, there are amrenc and aacplusenc, which respectively encodes to AMR and AAC+

nokiatagger

If you use mp4tools to encode songs to listen them in a Nokia phone
you will notice that you will not be able to tag your encoded files.
This because Nokia uses a non standard tag system.
Fortunately I made my own tool to tag them, so feel free to use it.
Download it: nokiatagger.c
and compile it in the usual way:
gcc nokiatagger.c -o nokiatagger