My first attempt was with Handbrake. That converted the MOV to an MP4 very nicely. However, I wasn’t able to upload those to Blip.tv and have them convert successfully every time to an flv. Blip was timing out on the longer videos and poorly converting the smaller ones.

I then decided to try the command line ffmpeg. There weren’t any gui tools around it that I found in the repo’s, so I just tried the standard

ffmpeg -i inputfilename.mov outputfilename.flv

but that did not work. Apparently JVC doesn’t put all the right properties into the mpg2 for ffmpeg to automatically pick up the properties because I kept getting a Floating point exception.

I assumed I needed to just manually set the full command with all the different video and audio settings, but I didn’t know what those should be.

After a bit more googling I found winff. From that app I copied the command line arguments over, tweaked them a bit, and came out with this:

ffmpeg -i INPUTFILENAME.mov -vcodec libx264 -deinterlace -vpre hq -crf 22 -r 29.97 -s 960×540 -aspect 16:9 -bf 2 -b 2000kb -ac 1 -ar 22050 -ab 96k OUTPUTFILENAME.flv

The trick is to use the libx264 codec instead of the flv one. After uploading these converted movies to Blip.tv I was pleased with the results.