How to Install FFmpeg in Linux ~The Easy Way~

FFmpeg is so important if you are planning to run a video website with streaming with conversion of video files to different video formats although you might want to upgrade to dedicated server hosting because it takes a huge amount of bandwidth. This tutorial is intended for Centos/Redhat versions of Linux where any novice user can install ffmpeg without compiling the source which is a more traditional way of installing the FFmpeg software on linux servers. In this tutorial i will show you the easy way to install ffmpeg and ffmpeg-php (php extension) with just yum rather than compiling ffmpeg from source files.

FFmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu)
Mplayer + Mencoder (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html)
Flv2tool (http://inlet-media.de/flvtool2)
Libogg + Libvorbis (http://www.xiph.org/downloads)
LAME MP3 Encoder (http://lame.sourceforge.net)
FlowPlayer - A Free Flash Video Player - http://flowplayer.org/

Installing FFMpeg

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

If you get package not found, then you will need to add few lines in the yum repository for dag packages installation. Create a file named dag.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d with the following contents on it

[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

then

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

If everything is fine, then the installation should proceed smoothly. If not you will get something like warning GPG public key missing .

Common Errors

To fix rpmforge GPG key warning:

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

For more information refer to this faq depending on Centos version

Missing Dependency Error:

If you get missing dependency error like shown below, in the middle of ffmpeg installation

Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package ffmpeg
Error: Missing Dependency: libtheora.so.0(libtheora.so.1.0) is needed by package ffmpeg
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package ffmpeg
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package imlib2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package a52dec
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package imlib2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package gsm
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package x264
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package xvidcore
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package lame
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package a52dec
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package faad2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package x264
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package lame
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package xvidcore
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package faac
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package faad2
Error: Missing Dependency: libgif.so.4 is needed by package imlib2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package faac
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package gsm
Error: Missing Dependency: libpng12.so.0(PNG12_0) is needed by package imlib2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package libmp4v2
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package libmp4v2

then most commonly you have GLIB 2.3 installed instead of GLIB 2.4 version. To check the current GLIB version installed on your server. just use

yum list glib*

and it should list the latest GLIB package version.

The reason i was getting this error was my rpmforge packages was pointed to centos 5 versions instead of centos 4.6.

To fix dependency error:

To fix this error, you might need to check your rpmforge packages compatible to the release of your existing CentOS version.
Check the file /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo and it should look like for Centos 4.6(Final). If you have lines like http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/mirrors-rpmforge you might need to make changes to the rpmforge.repos like shown below

Note: Backup the original rpmforge.repo file before you edit its content.

[rpmforge]
name = Red Hat Enterprise $releasever - RPMforge.net - dag
#baseurl = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/$basearch/dag
mirrorlist = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/mirrors-rpmforge
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge
enabled = 1
protect = 0
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1

To know what linux type and version you are running

cat /etc/redhat-release

Once this is done, do again yum install ffmpeg.

This trick resolved the problem in my linux box running Centos 4.6 and this is the only way i found to install ffmpeg using yum.

To check the FFmpeg working:

Finally, check the ffmpeg whether it is working or not.

> ffmpeg
> ffmpeg -formats
> ffmpeg --help
// This lists path of mpeg, its modules and other path information

ffmpeg -i Input.file Output.file

To check what audi/video formats are supported

ffmpeg -formats > ffmpeg-format.txt

Open the ffmpeg-formats.txt to see the ooutput

D means decode
E means encode
V means video
A means audio
T = Truncated

Install FFMPEG-PHP Extension

FFmpeg-php is a very good extension and wrapper for PHP which can pull useful information about video through API interface. Inorder to install it you will need to download the source file and then compile and install extension in your server. You can download the source tarball : http://ffmpeg-php.sourceforge.net/

wget /path/to/this/file/ffmpeg-php-0.5.2.1.tbz2

tar -xjf ffmpeg-0.5.2.1.tbz2

phpize

./configure
make
make install

Common Errors

1. If you get command not found error for phpize, then you will need to do yum install php-devel

2. If you get error like "ffmpeg headers not found" while configuring the source.

configure: error: ffmpeg headers not found. Make sure ffmpeg is compiled as shared libraries using the --enable-shared option

then it means you have not installed ffmpeg-devel packages.

To Fix: Just install ffmpeg-devel using

yum install ffmpeg-devel

3. If you get an error like shared libraries not found problem and the program halts in the middle, then you must specify the ffmpeg installed path explicitly to the ./configure.

configure: error: ffmpeg shared libraries not found. Make sure ffmpeg is compiled as shared libraries using the --enable-shared option

To Fix:

1. First find out the ffmpeg path with ffmpeg --help command. The prefix default path should be like /usr/local/cpffmpeg
2. Configure the FFmpeg-php with --with-ffmpeg option

./configure --with-ffmpeg=/usr/local/cpffmpeg

That should resolve the problem!

Editing PHP.INI

Once you have done that without any problems then you will see the php extension file /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/ffmpeg.so and you will need mention that extension in php.ini file

nano /usr/local/lib/php.ini

Put the below two lines at the end of the php.ini file

[ffmpeg]
extension=ffmpeg.so

Then restart the server service httpd restart

To check whether ffmpeg enabled with php, point your browser to test.php file. It should show the confirmation of installed ffmpeg php extension

// #test.php

<?php

phpinfo()

If any case the ffmpeg does not show in the phpinfo() test make sure that php.ini path to ffmpeg.so is correct. Still the problem occurs, the reason could be you might be using older versions of ffmpeg-php which is buggy. Just download the latest version of ffmpeg-php source then compile it.

Installing Mplayer + Mencoder

Just issue the following yum commands to install the rest of the packages.

yum install mplayer mencoder

Installing FlvTool2

Flvtool2 is a flash video file manipulation tool. It can calculate metadata and can cut and edit cue points for flv files.

If you are on Centos 5 try yum install flvtool2 with dag repository and if you get package not found you will need to manually download and compile the flvtool2. You can download latest version of flvtool2 here: http://rubyforge.org/projects/flvtool2/

wget <url-link>

ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
sudo ruby setup.rb install

If you get command not found error, it probably means that you dont have ruby installed.

yum install ruby

Thats it! Once ffmpeg works fine with php extension, download a sample video, convert to .flv format in the command line and plug it to flowplayer to see it work on your web browser. Try also to download the video file offline and see whether the converted flv file works well with both audio and video.

Useful Links

Install FFmpeg from Compiling Source (Tutorial Link)
Nice FFmpeg Installation Tutorial (click here)
Important Audio Codecs (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/audio-codecs.html)
Common Errors & Fixes while Installing FFmpeg (click here)

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