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Installing Ffmpeg on Linux

For Asset Bank to be able to create thumbnails and previews for video and audio files Asset Bank uses Ffmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu).

The following instuctions explain how to install Ffmpeg and required libraries from source (and so they require a compiler such as gcc). Please note:

• The required libs will be installed into /usr/local (/usr/local/lib; /usr/local/bin etc). Ffmpeg will be installed into /usr/local/bin
• These instructions may need to be varied for different versions of Linux. We have also provided specific instructions for Debian GNU/Linux Squeeze (6.0) and Lenny (5.0) which we recommend that you use if you are running Debian
• You may not need to install the libraries and programs that ffmpeg needs (lame, libx264, libvorbis, libtheora, libspeex and yasm) from source - you may be able to install using your package manager. For example, on Debian you can install them using app-get install libmp3lame-dev libvorbis-dev libtheora-dev libx264-dev libspeex-dev yasm. You may need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list to add add:
  deb http://debian-multimedia.org/ squeeze main non-free

1. Configure the Library Search Path

Because you will be installing libraries into /usr/local/lib you need to make sure that the dynamic linker (ld.so) looks in /usr/local/lib when it is searching for libraries. Some distributions include /usr/ local/lib in the dynamic library search path by default but some do not (notably Red Hat).

View /etc/ld.so.conf using "more" or "less". If it already contains the line "/usr/local/lib" then the library search path is already OK so please skip to the next section.

If /etc/ld.so.conf contains the line "include ld.so.conf.d/*.conf" then create a file called /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf containing the line "/usr/local/lib". If you are installing on a 64-bit version of Linux ("uname -m" command returns "x86_64") then add another line containing "/usr/local/lib64" as well. If /etc/ld.so.conf does NOT contain the line "include ld.so.conf.d/*.conf" then add these lines to the end of /etc/ld.so.conf instead of creating a seperate /etc/ ld.so.conf.d/local.conf file.

Run "/sbin/ldconfig" as root. This command updates the dynamic linker's cache of library locations. You should also run this command after installing libraries.

2. Install Lame

1. 2.1) Download the tar file. Get the latest version from http://lame.sourceforge.net/download.php
2. 2.2) Untar the installation files: tar xf lame-x.y.tar
3. 2.3) Move into the installation directory then build, configure and install: cd lame-x.y
   ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
   make
   sudo make install

3. Install libbogg, libvorbis, libtheora and libspeex

1. 3.1) Download libvorbis, libtheora, libspeex and libbogg from http://xiph.org/downloads/, and compile and install them.

4. Install yasm

1. 3.1) Download yasm from http://yasm.tortall.net/Download.html and compile and install it.

5. Install 264

1. 3.1) Download x264 from http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html configure with these options "./configure --libdir=/usr/local/lib --includedir=/usr/local/include/ --enable-shared --prefix=/usr" and compile and install it.

6. Install Ffmpeg

1. 6.1) Download and extract the ffmpeg source code: mkdir software
   cd software
   wget http://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-0.8.3.tar.bz2
   cd ..
   mkdir src
   cd src
   tar xvjf ../software/ffmpeg-0.8.3.tar.bz2
2. 6.2) Move into the source directory: cd ffmpeg-0.8.3
3. 6.3) If you have installed the required libs from source and have problems linking, make sure /usr/lib is in the search path. For example, set the library path: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib
4. 6.4) Configure, build and install: ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-avfilter --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libx264 --enable-libspeex --enable-shared --enable-pthreads
   make
   sudo make install
5. 6.5) Run "/sbin/ldconfig" as root.

Notes:

• In the past it has sometimes been necessary to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable to allow ffmpeg to find the libraries it requires. If ffmpeg fails with errors like "error while loading shared libraries: libfaac.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" then you can try setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH. This can be done by adding export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib to the file setenv.sh in [tomcat]/bin