Automatic conversion of aac to m4a

[Richard Hughes]

> On 14 Mar 2011, at 09:42, <shevek at o2.co.uk> <shevek at o2.co.uk> wrote:
>> Why introduce a new tool into get_iplayer? 
>> 
>> Ffmpeg can do this already. 
>> 
>> See my post [1] for details
>> 
>> I agree with the --m4a option but I think it should use ffmpeg
> 
> 
> Absolutely agree that no further deps should be added to get_iplayer unless we're sure they're necessary.
> 
> Surely it must be possible with the tools we have already to remux properly.


I don't know if this is worth considering, but here's what I started doing when get_iplayer started delivering AAC files instead of MP3.

I tried all sorts of different apps (on MacOSX) for reading the AAC files without success. I couldn't doing anything with them in ffmpeg. But I DID manage to successfully convert the AAC audio from the raw .flv file to MP3 using ffmpeg, e.g.

ffmpeg -i downloaded_file.flv -vn -ab 64k output.mp3

...where downloaded_file.flv was obtained using get_iplayer --raw

So that suggests to me that a solution for .m4a or .mp3 should be possible without any more tools.

Richard