ffmpeg is a free and very powerful video encoding tool that is the basis of many other popular video encoding tools, with a command line interface.
Because of the frequent updates to ffmpeg and the codecs it uses, it is often best to download the latest source and compile it yourself. These updates usually include new features, bug fixes, support for new codecs and noticeable speed improvements. Most Linux distributions have outdated packages in their repositories so being able to compile the latest code from source is very useful
I use ffmpeg to output H.264 video with AAC audio in a MP4 container. I also occasionally convert audio to mp3. This means I will be compiling the following:
Preparing to compile on Linux
(If you already compile things on Linux, skip to the next section.)
First make sure that you have all of the tools and headers required to compile on Linux. On Debian based systems (including Ubuntu) you can usually run the following as root to get everything you need. First update your system. It is important that you get the latest kernel and the correct sources for it.
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
A reboot may be required here if your kernel updated.
Now get the compilers, tools and headers needed to compile software on Linux:
apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-`uname -r` git subversion yasm
NB: your “git” package may be called something like “git-core”
Compile ffmpeg (empty)
Because some libraries require ffmpeg to be installed, we will first install a blank copy with no additional codecs specified.
When I update, I often find that I need to recompile a blank version of ffmpeg before I can compile x264.
Download the latest ffmpeg source with subversion, configure, compile:
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure
make
If this all worked with no errors (you can check with echo $?), run
as root. Use su or sudo if you need to. I use su.
Compile faac and faad
Download and extract faac and faad from audiocoding.com.
As above, run
./configure
make
su -c 'make install'
on both libraries.
You can optionally do the same thing with LAME if you want to be able to encode mp3 audio.
Compile x264
Download and compile the latest x264 source with git:
git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
cd x264
./configure
make
su -c 'make install'
Compile ffmpeg with the above codecs
Now that we have all of the codecs (x264, aac, mp3) successfully installed as libraries on the system, we can reinstall ffmpeg to incorporate these libraries. First go back to the ffmpeg source directory and clean off the previous compile.
Now configure to enable all of the installed libraries and recompile:
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads --enable-libx264 --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame
make
(if it tells you that –enable-libfaad is not an option, just remove it. It’s probably either been rolled into faac or ffmpeg has it built in)
If it all worked, run make install as root.
Testing
As long as /usr/local/bin/ is on your $PATH environment variable, you should be able to just type ffmpeg to check that it is all installed. It should look something like this:
$ ffmpeg
FFmpeg version SVN-r23548, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
built on Jun 9 2010 13:35:17 with gcc 4.4.4
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads --enable-libx264 --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame
libavutil 50.18. 0 / 50.18. 0
libavcodec 52.75. 1 / 52.75. 1
libavformat 52.68. 0 / 52.68. 0
libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
libavfilter 1.20. 0 / 1.20. 0
libswscale 0.11. 0 / 0.11. 0
Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder
usage: ffmpeg [options] [[infile options] -i infile]... {[outfile options] outfile}...
Use -h to get full help or, even better, run 'man ffmpeg'Using ffmpeg
I have written a small Python video encoding script to make encoding as easy as
If anyone has any suggestions to improve this, such as any advantages of using shared libraries, please feel free to post these suggestions in the comments.
