By the way, you can speed-up the audio dumping with this command:
mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast max.dv

Thanks Dave for this nice article.

I almost immediately tried to apply it to my mythtv box transcoding.

However I run into the problem that QuickTime 7 refuses to open the produced mp4 file, even though mplayer does. All I added was --sar 4:3. I also changed the FPS to 29.97 (MythTV NTSC).

I was curious if someone was successful at getting QuickTime 7 to read the H264 file.

Here is the script I made (python) out of the article:

def transcode_file(src, dst):
os.system('mkfifo test.fifo')
os.system('mplayer -ao pcm:file=test.fifo -vc null -vo null "%s" &' % src)
time.sleep(2)
res = os.system('faac test.fifo -o test.aac')

# video to x264
os.putenv("LD_LIBRARY_PATH", "/usr/local/lib")
res = os.system('mencoder -vf format=i420 -ovc raw -of rawvideo -ofps 29.97 -oac copy -o test.fifo "%s" &' % src)
time.sleep(2)
res = os.system('/usr/local/bin/x264 -o test.mp4 --fps 29.97 --bframes 2 --progress --crf 26 --subme 6 --analyse p8x8,b8x8,i4x4,p4x4 --no-psnr test.fifo --sar 4:3 480x480')

res = os.system('/usr/local/bin/MP4Box -add test.mp4 -add test.aac -fps 29.97 "%s"' % dst)
os.system('rm -rf test.fifo test.aac test.mp4')

On Fedora Core 5 (i386)
x264 and gpac from SVN

Anyway, I was blown away by the quality compared to DivX.

Regards,
alex