Exporting from Avidemux to MP4

For some reason, Helsinki University’s Unitube  crashes when trying to upload an MKV file. The same used to work last year… Only proprietary formats seem to be ok (such as MP4). This creates lots of additional work for me, since I use open source tools to edit my lecture recordings (mostly to cut out unnecessary parts).However, to create an MP4 file, I need to transcode, which is a time-consuming process that requires changing many of the default settings. Below the process using the Open source software Avidemux:

1. Select MPEG-4 AVC in the Video dropdown menu on the top left.
2. Configure the Video, any 2-pass average bitrate of above 8000 seems to be fine.
3. Configure the audio as MP3(lame)
4. Use a filter to resample audio at 48000Hz.
5. As the export format, choose MP4
6. When you save now, you should see that Avidemux automatically adds the MP4 extension to the file.
7. This is not fast! Even on a fast machine, the transcoding might take 10 minutes or so. Plus, the re-uploading to Unitube takes at least another 10 minutes. Like in the good old days, you are not allowed to close the Unitube upload/processing window; otherwise, all will be lost…