How to get ffmpeg to transcode your over the air mpeg2ts to iphone 3G

I got this figured out, so I thought I would share this with anyone transcoding mpeg2ts (over the air high definition) to something that the iphone 3G can play from a streaming server such as apache. Here is my ffmpeg line:

ffmpeg -i "${directory}/${file}" -async 3 -r 29.97 -acodec libfaac -ar ${rate}
-ab ${abitrate} -ac 2 -s ${width}x${height} -vcodec mpeg4 -b ${vbitrate} -flags
+aic+mv4 -mbd 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -g 250 -maxrate 512k -bufsize 2M -title "${file}"
 "${directory}/${file}.mp4"

The key here is to ensure the playback is at no more than 30 frames a second, or your iphone will play like 1 second and then stop...like it can't buffer the stream. Of course, when you do this, you will lose audio/video sync since you just yanked some frames out out the stream, so you need to use -async 3 to fix this; 3 works for me, but you may want to experiment. Also, I am using a recent SVN trunk compilation of ffmpeg with libfaac and xvid enabled in the compilation. This made a huge difference in whether ffmpeg could work with me on this TS file.

Now the bash like variables are exactly that, bash variable interpolations. Rate is the sample frequency of the audio...something like 44100 or 48000, abirate is the audio bit rate...something like 128k, the vbirate is not crucial, the video bit rate, something like 480K or 378K. The vbirate will really make the resulting file smallish. The original was prolly 2 or 3 times that. The dimensions usually work out to be 320x240, but I have also used 432x240 with success for 1.78 ratios.