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