ffmpeg is an incredibly versatile and handy tool for working with media files. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu repository no longer tracks changes to ffmpeg.

Obtain the ffmpeg sources, and build a current version on an Ubuntu server.

ffmpeg is a great tool, but, a little while ago, Ubuntu switched to avconv, a fork of ffmpeg. Unfortunately, avconv really isn't as good as ffmpeg. As such, the ffmpeg version with Ubuntu is pretty deprecated, and a lot of things don't work right.

This project will walk through the setup and compilation of the most recent ffmpeg version.

There are a few dependencies for ffmpeg that should be updated before we move onto compilation. First, update your repository.

sudo apt-get update

Next, we'll install the dependencies.

sudo apt-get -y install autoconf automake build-essential libass-dev libfreetype6-dev libgpac-dev libsdl1.2-dev libtheora-dev libtool libva-dev libvdpau-dev libvorbis-dev libx11-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev pkg-config texi2html zlib1g-dev

Finally, we'll install yasm, an assembler which will optimize the build time.

sudo apt-get install yasm

Now, we need to get the sources for ffmpeg. First, make a directory in your home directory titled ffmpeg_sources

mkdir ~/ffmpeg_sources

There are a few encoder dependencies that need to be gotten and built for ffmpeg. First, the H.264 video codec.

cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
wget http://download.videolan.org/pub/x264/snapshots/last_x264.tar.bz2
tar xjvf last_x264.tar.bz2
cd x264-snapshot*
./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --bindir="$HOME/bin" --enable-static
make
make install
make distclean

Next, we need the AAC audio encoder.

cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
wget -O fdk-aac.zip https://github.com/mstorsjo/fdk-aac/zipball/master
unzip fdk-aac.zip
cd mstorsjo-fdk-aac*
autoreconf -fiv
./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --disable-shared
make
make install
make distclean

Next, the MP3 audio codec.

sudo apt-get install libmp3lame-dev

Now, we'll get the sources for ffmpeg and compile them.

cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
wget http://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2
tar xjvf ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2
cd ffmpeg
PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib/pkgconfig"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH
./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --extra-cflags="-I$HOME/ffmpeg_build/include" --extra-ldflags="-L$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib" --bindir="$HOME/bin" --extra-libs="-ldl" --enable-gpl --enable-libass --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libfreetype --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopus --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree --enable-x11grab
make
make install
make distclean
hash -r