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Install FFmpeg on a Linux Box

Install FFmpeg via CLI on Linux box

These steps walk through installing a static binary of any ffmpeg version on to your linux machine. If you want to compile from source, there are several ways to do so. Here's the official guide. Tested and works on an AWS EC2 Ubuntu instance, but should work on any Linux machine.

  • SSH into your instance and become root

    $ sudo su -

  • cd to the the /usr/local/bin directory

    $ cd /usr/local/bin

  • Inside the /usr/local/bin directory, create an /ffmpeg directory

    $ mkdir ffmpeg

  • cd into the new directory

    $ cd ffmpeg

  • Check the static build directory at:

    $ wget http://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/releases/ffmpeg-release-64bit-static.tar.xz

  • The file should now be in /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg. Untar it...

    $ tar xf ffmpeg-release-64bit-static.tar.xz

  • Run it and check what the latest version is

    $ ./ffmpeg -version

The output should look something like this

ffmpeg version N-60675-g8fe1076
built on Feb 16 2014 05:45:47 with gcc 4.6 (Debian 4.6.3-1)
configuration: --prefix=/root/ffmpeg-static/64bit --extra-cflags='-I/root/ffmpeg-
static/64bit/include -static' --extra-ldflags='-L/root/ffmpeg-static/64bit/lib -static' --
extra-libs='-lxml2 -lexpat -lfreetype' --enable-static --disable-shared --disable-ffserver --
disable-doc --enable-bzlib --enable-zlib --enable-postproc --enable-runtime-cpudetect --
enable-libx264 --enable-gpl --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libmp3lame --
enable-gray --enable-libass --enable-libfreetype --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libspeex --
enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-version3 --enable-libvpx
libavutil 52. 64.100 / 52. 64.100
libavcodec 55. 52.102 / 55. 52.102
libavformat 55. 32.101 / 55. 32.101
libavdevice 55. 9.101 / 55. 9.101
libavfilter 4. 1.102 / 4. 1.102
libswscale 2. 5.101 / 2. 5.101
libswresample 0. 17.104 / 0. 17.104
libpostproc 52. 3.100 / 52. 3.100
  • Move the contents of your static untarred folder into the parent /ffmpeg dir
  $ mv * ../
  • If you want to be able to execute $ ffmpeg from any directory, you'll need to create a symlink inside /usr/bin:
  $ ln -s /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg
  $ ln -s /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg/ffprobe /usr/bin/ffprobe #for ffprobe

done. You are now able to run the $ ffmpeg command from anywhere.

credit: this AWS forum thread

@zmusaddique
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simply awesome. the content of this page must be present on johnvansickle's page which has links to the releases.

Yes, that would be super helpful.

@khaivcqk
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khaivcqk commented Feb 29, 2024

I got an error -bash: ./ffmpeg: cannot execute binary file when install in Centos . What wrong? help me pls

@elnurxf
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elnurxf commented Feb 29, 2024

I would suggest use https://github.com/ivoglent/ffmpeg-composer-bin and check for CHMOD 0777

@khaivcqk
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@elnurxf thank you. I resolved my issue. I download amd architecture version instead of arm for centos OS

@Maverton
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Maverton commented Feb 29, 2024 via email

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