If you choose a low resolution, the video will be small and it will be blurry when users will put it full-screen. Resolution gives “sharpness” to the overall image. Now you'll have to decide on two things - the resolution, bitrate and profile you want those videos in.

Step 2: Choose resolution, bitrate and profile If you already know what “bitrates, profiles etc.” are and just want the command lines skip to step 4 or sample command lines. As I don't use any machines with OS X you'll have to check for yourself. OS X users: MacPorts should be able to compile and install FFmpeg with libvpx and libx264. Windows users: Zeranoe has great static builds of FFmpeg for Windows with libx264 and libvpx included. Don't forget libx264 for H.264 and libvpx for VP8/WEBM if you want that support. I strongly suggest you use a stable FFmpeg build (that's 0.9 at the moment) instead of git master. Ubuntu users: UbuntuForums has a great guide for compiling newest FFMpeg build. Most distribution builds are very old, buggy and have numerous issues. So here's my guide for encoding web videos using recent FFMpeg versions for Flash and HTML5.

Web is full of articles about encoding videos with FFmpeg, however most of them are obsolete and use old non-working FFmpeg parameters.

Ispy ffmpeg h264