I’m putting together a video for our band’s 10-year anniversary party. The only software I have at hand is iMovie ’09 (that’s 8.0.5) on my Snow Leopard-equipped Macbook. The thing is, iMovie’s picky about the video formats it accepts. These are “MPEG-4 or DV file formats, and some .mov file formats.” So, you’re out of luck with DivX-encoded AVIs, for example.
The excellent VLC video player can transcode videos to a variety of formats, but being a complete n00b when it comes to these things, I couldn’t find the right flags that would’ve produced iMovie-worthy files from DivX-encoded AVIs, for example. Luckily, Handbrake was easier to use. It even had some presets for encoding files into formats accepted by iPods, for example. These are the settings that worked for me:
Format: MP4 file
Video Codec: MPEG-4 (FFmpeg)
Framerate: Same as source
Quality: avg bitrate 5000kbps (this was good enough for me — choosing constant quality (e.g. “90%”) made the videos not work in QuickTime/iMovie!)
Audio: AAC, 160kbps
After an evening of transcoding, I’m finally ready to put the damn thing together 
