FFmpeg and Azure Media Services

Today I was preparing some video material for upload onto the Azure Media Services portal. Since MXF format is not supported as source for Azure Media Services I did transcode it with ffmpeg. I uploaded the videos but every encode job would fail with this error


Encoding task
UserInput : File type or codec not supported.

I checked again and again:

  • mp4 container: supported
  • aac audio, various profiles: supported
  • h264 video, various profiles: supported

But every encode task would fail. It turns out that ffmpeg encodes video in a 4:2:2 bitplane format by default but Azure supports only 4:2:0. By adding the option
-pix_fmt yuv420p
the the ffmpeg command line Azure encodes the videos resulting without any issue

2 Replies to “FFmpeg and Azure Media Services”

  1. Christiano,

    If you are using the Azure portal primarily, your encoding jobs are going to the older encoder still. That will be updated on 1/20. After that date all jobs will go to the Media Encoder Standard which supports MXF with 4:2:2

    If you have access to a Windows machine, you can submit the same job through our Azure Media Explorer tool. http://aka.ms/AMSE

    It will allow you to encode with our latest encoder.

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