Compile FFmpeg on CentOS

This guide is based on a minimal CentOS installation and will install FFmpeg with several external encoding libraries. This guide is kept relatively up to date with FFmpeg development and library sources (see the page history for changelog), and should also work for recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Fedora.

Note: The # indicates that the command should be executed as superuser or root.

Preparation

Remove any existing packages:

# yum erase ffmpeg x264 x264-devel 

Get the dependencies:

# yum install autoconf automake gcc gcc-c++ git libtool make nasm pkgconfig wget zlib-devel 

Make a source directory:

mkdir ~/ffmpeg-source 

Installation

Yasm

Yasm is an assembler used by x264 and FFmpeg.

cd ~/ffmpeg-source wget http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/releases/yasm-1.2.0.tar.gz tar xzvf yasm-1.2.0.tar.gz cd yasm-1.2.0 ./configure make # make install 

Note: If you do not require certain encoders you may skip the relevant section and then remove the appropriate ./configure option in FFmpeg. For example, if libvorbis is not needed, then skip that section and then remove --enable-libvorbis from the Install FFmpeg section.

x264

H.264 video encoder.

cd ~/ffmpeg-source git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264 cd x264 ./configure --enable-static make # make install 

libfdk_aac

AAC audio encoder.

cd ~/ffmpeg-source git clone --depth 1 git://github.com/mstorsjo/fdk-aac.git cd fdk-aac autoreconf -fiv ./configure --disable-shared make # make install 

LAME

MP3 audio encoder.

cd ~/ffmpeg-source wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/lame/lame/3.99/lame-3.99.5.tar.gz tar xzvf lame-3.99.5.tar.gz cd lame-3.99.5 ./configure --disable-shared --enable-nasm make # make install 

libogg

Required for libtheora and libvorbis.

cd ~/ffmpeg-source wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.3.0.tar.gz tar xzvf libogg-1.3.0.tar.gz cd libogg-1.3.0 ./configure --disable-shared make # make install 

libtheora

Theora video encoder.

cd ~/ffmpeg-source wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/theora/libtheora-1.1.1.tar.gz tar xzvf libtheora-1.1.1.tar.gz cd libtheora-1.1.1 ./configure --disable-shared make # make install 

libvorbis

Vorbis audio encoder.

cd ~/ffmpeg-source wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/libvorbis-1.3.3.tar.gz tar xzvf libvorbis-1.3.3.tar.gz cd libvorbis-1.3.3 ./configure --disable-shared make # make install 

libvpx

VP8 video encoder.

cd ~/ffmpeg-source git clone http://git.chromium.org/webm/libvpx.git cd libvpx ./configure make # make install 

FFmpeg

cd ~/ffmpeg-source git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg cd ffmpeg ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libfdk_aac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 make # make install 

Compilation is now complete and ffmpeg should now be ready to use.