avconv video from single jpg and ogg

Question

I have a long ogg sounds file that I want to put on youtube, I don't have a video so want to display a single jpg for the duration for the ogg. I've seen:

 avconv -i "sound file.ogg" -i cog.jpg out.avi

I have adjusted the jpg to be 640 x 480 but I get the following warnings:

 Incompatible pixel format 'yuvj420p' for codec 'mpeg4', auto-selecting format 'yuv420p'

 Incompatible sample format 's16' for codec 'ac3', auto-selecting format 'flt'
 [ac3 @ 0x18ae340] invalid bit rate

And it bombs out on:

 Error while opening encoder for output stream #0:1 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

Any ideas on what parameters I could use to make this work?

Answer 1

Without seeing the full command line output this boils down to guessing, but it seems avconv selects the AC3 encoder for audio here, which isn't a useful default.

Try specifying the encoders you want to use. For YouTube, H.264 and AAC is recommended instead of MPEG-4 Part 2 video and AC3 audio.

avconv -loop 1 -i cog.jpg -i "sound file.ogg" \
-c:v libx264 -tune stillimage -pix_fmt yuv420p \
-c:a libfaac -q:a 100 \
-shortest \
out.mp4

You should add the -loop 1 option to force looping the image, and the -shortest option to stop encoding after there's no more audio. Instead of -shortest you can also specify -t 00:02:30 to stop after 2:30 minutes, which would be more accurate than -shortest.

The above should work with any recent versions. Please note that avconv is not from FFmpeg, but the Libav fork and thus entirely unrelated to the ffmpeg command.