Mac OS X and .m4v files // VLC Transcoder as an Alternative

[saskwatch]

I am currently running Subsonic on the latest version of OS X. Everything works great (mostly) except for streaming of .m4v files. This seems to be a recurring theme on this board. Unfortunately for me 90% of my collection is in this format. There have been a lot of discussion about ffmpeg here. From the various threads on the subject, it seems that there is no magic string to put in my transcode settings to get the version of ffmpeg that was bundled with Subsonic to work. Though some have said that they have been successful, while I have not been. Frustrating, but ok - I now accept that now.

I would like to move on to use VLC as the transcoder vs. ffmpeg. I have searched around on the board, and I have found a couple topics on this. One topic was for Linux, and the other version was for Windows.

Can somebody provide a noob step-by-step guide of getting this to work for Mac?