PhillC's Journal: Install FFMPEG on Ubuntu Gutsy

I wanted to install FFMPEG on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) desktop machine. This is so I can encode and transcode video files to various formats locally, and also render projects from the non-linear editor (NLE) PiTiVi.

This post will mainly cover just the commands I used to install FFMPEG on Gutsy, with very little commentary regarding why or how things work. If you want a more in-depth look at installing FFMPEG, you can read about the installation of FFMPEG on my Debian Etch server earlier today - which ultimately moves me closer to on-the-fly video transcoding of user submitted content on Kapital Moto TV

Installing FFMPEG on Ubuntu Gutsy:

sudo apt-get build-dep ffmpeg

sudo apt-get install liblame-dev libfaad2-dev libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev liba52-0.7.4 liba52-0.7.4-dev libx264-dev libdts-dev checkinstall build-essential subversion

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

cd ffmpeg

make distclean (I used this because I already had an older SVN snapshot of FFMPEG downloaded, configured and made from last night)

./configure --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-liba52 --enable-libdc1394 --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac --enable-libxvid --enable-pthreads --enable-libx264

make

sudo checkinstall

Some things you might want to do when prompted to by checkinstall:

• Select 0 change maintainer name
• Select 3 to set version name. I used svn11213-ubuntu-gutsy-20071213

And that's it FFMPEG installed on Ubuntu Gutsy.

Other links:

• Installing FFMPEG on Debian Etch - a far more detailed summary of a very similar process
• FFMPEG User Documentation - where to go next to learn to use FFMPEG
• MPEG4 and H.264 - all about these at the Video Forums.