I had acquired some high quality images and was willing to encode them into a video, but ffmpeg default settings was always outputting a ugly video which had 1280x720, but with lots of artifacts. After googling a little, I've found: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3561715/using-ffmpeg-to-encode-a-high-quality-video Digging a little more on the comments I've found: You need to specify the -vb option to increase the video bitrate, otherwise you get the default which produces smaller videos but with more artifacts. Try something like this: ffmpeg -r 25 -i %4d.png -vb 20M myvideo.mpg So, the key was the -vb flag! ffmpeg -i Image-%d.jpg -s 1280x720 -aspect 16:9 -r 24 -vb 20M teste.mp4