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HowTo: Install ffmpeg, ffmpeg-php and codecs automagically (Centos 5.2)

June 14, 2009
- Posted in:

A client recently requested ffmpeg to be installed on the server. I have done this in the past on a client's box but he had a different OS setup. For that installation I used a HowTo guide from VexxHost.

For the Lafayette Web server, we are running Centos 5.2, I did some scouting and found what seemed to be a good ffmpeg tutorial but in the end I couldn't get "make" and "make install" to take.

Everyone loves automagic installations! After the first failure I bumped into a forum that let's you download a tarball and install ffmpeg without any hitches and within 20 minutes. This attempt did work!

Pros and Cons of Auto Installer

Con: The downside to the ffmpeg auto install script, you end up downloading and installing many ffmpeg related libraries you might not need.
Pros: No errors and installtions works as expected (at least for my setup).

There are a few things you should know before you get started:

  • Must be a Linux/Unix/POSIX server
  • Must need root shell(bash) access
  • Must need 200 MB of free space in your server
  • The author of this gpl ffmpeg auto install script will know your server ip (see below how to remove this) upon installation.
  • Check if yum is installed or not in the server. If there is no yum, please make sure automake,autoconf and libtools are installed. It is reccommend to configure the distribution specific yum.

Privacy

The one thing I don't like about this script is that it auto emails your server ip to the script owner. You can change this if you want. See instructions below. You also are downloading most of the needed resources from the author (trulymanaged.com) as well, so they will know you (server ip) are using their resources. I would feel much better if the resources were being downloaded from sourceforge or some other trusted name in the Open Source community.

If this doesn't concern you, then no worries. I checked over each x.sh file and didn't see anything else that would cause a security concern.

Setup Installation

First, open up SSH (I like using putty) and login as "root". Once there, run the below commands:

mkdir ~/ffmpeg-packages
cd ~/ffmpeg-packages
wget http://trulymanaged.com/ffmpeg/ffmpeginstall.tar.gz
tar -xvzf ffmpeginstall.tar.gz
cd ffmpeginstall

If you don't want the author to be emailed upon a successful installation, comment out line 47 of install.sh Here is how...

At the command prompt

# nano install.sh

Now comment out line 47

From

echo `hostname -i `|mail -s " FFmpeg installed $_version " vps @ esds.com

To

# echo `hostname -i `|mail -s " FFmpeg installed $_version " vps @ esds.com

Now let's begin the installation process

./install.sh

Once the installation starts you will see the verbose messages, letting you know the status of the installation.

End Result

You can end up serving videos youtube style. This video was transcoded yesterday with FFmpeg + Drupal + Open Package Video (read more)