Making an MP4 Video

I've been working on switching any/all of my older videos from their original format (.mov, .avi, etc) into an .mp4 container. This will let my PS3 stream the videos, allow my MythTV setup to stream them, and even allow my phone to do the same. It's pretty nice, actually.

Of course, getting to that point was more than a little painful. It seems that the whole process is spottily documented (at best). In the end, I did manage to make it work on my system. While this won't work for everybody (since it's written for Ubuntu 10.10), hopefully it will help out somewhat.

Steps:

1. Install bc and mpeg4ip-server (for the command mp4creator). These packages come from Ubuntu's standard repositories.
2. Install mplayer from Medibuntu
3. Download this script (syntax highlighted version here) into a file named /usr/local/bin/androidmp4 and make that script executable

Now, you can simply run "androidmp4 video_file_name", and wait. You will be given a file that can be played on at least your PS3 and the Samsung Galaxy S series of phones.