Building FFMpeg - Ubuntu

One continued frustrating point I struggle with is that often command line arguments are version-specific at least often enough to present frustration. For that reason, we'll build FFMpeg from source to make sure the examples work as expected.

The following is the process for configuring/building FFMpeg from scratch on Ubuntu 17.04.  The process should be similar for newer versions as well.

Download

$ wget https://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-2.7.2.tar.bz2

Build

$ tar -jxvf ffmpeg-2.7.2.tar.bz2

$ cd ffmpeg-2.7.2

$ sudo apt-get install libx264-dev

$ sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev

$ sudo apt-get install yasm

$ sudo apt-get install libfreetype6-dev

$ sudo apt-get install libmp3lame-dev

$ sudo apt-get install libzmq-dev

$ ./configure --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree --enable-gpl --enable-libfreetype --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libzmq

$ make

$ make alltools

Install

$ sudo make install

Let's copy a useful utility to the same directory location as ffmpeg.

$ which ffmpeg

$ sudo cp ./tools/graph2dot /usr/local/bin/

Verify

For future reference, you can query the build parameters used to configure FFMpeg by requesting the version info:

$ ffmpeg -v