Installing latest FFMPEG on Debian Etch

How to install the latest FFMPEG on a Debian 4 ("Etch") server? This post encouraged me to try it, despite the fact that it needs compiling from source, and that Etch isn't even the current "stable" Debian anymore. PhillC's post helped a lot, but it still didn't work for me exactly as described there. So here is how it eventually did work for me.

# echo "deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main" >>/etc/apt/sources.list

or

# echo "deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main" >>/etc/apt/sources.list

(I used both, and fiddled with enabling and disabling that repository, so I'm not sure anymore which one ended up being useful).

aptitude update gave me a GPG error, so I had to add the key it mentioned:

# gpg --keyserver hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net --recv-keys 07DC563D1F41B907
# gpg --armor --export 07DC563D1F41B907 | apt-key add -
# aptitude update

The following didn't work, or only worked partially:

# apt-get build-dep ffmpeg

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
E: Unable to find a source package for ffmpegcvs

I continued anyway with the long install line of various libraries. I had to remove some of these libraries from the suggested install line. Particularly, since I had to recompile libx264 anyway, I should have removed libx264-dev at this point. It is removed in the line below:

# aptitude install liblame-dev libfaad-dev libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev liba52-0.7.4 liba52-0.7.4-dev build-essential subversion

# cd /usr/src
# svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

And so I got the current version as of March 17:

Checked out external at revision 28979.

Checked out revision 18021.

And I tried configure:

# cd /usr/src/ffmpeg
# ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-libvorbis --enable-liba52 --enable-libdc1394 --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac --enable-pthreads --enable-libx264 -enable-libxvid

After various errors, and removing options, I ended up with this error:

ERROR: libx264 version must be >= 0.65.

And trying to install that from the debian-multimedia.org repository didn't work either:

# aptitude install libx264-65

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libx264-65: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.7-1) but 2.3.6.ds1-13etch8 is installed and it is kept back.

So this thread came to rescue, and I embarked on getting x264 and compiling that from source too:

# aptitude install git git-core

Trying to use Git at this point gives an error, but suggests the solution:

# update-alternatives --config git

There are 2 alternatives which provide `git'.
Selection    Alternative
-----------------------------------------------
*+        1    /usr/bin/git.transition
        2    /usr/bin/git-scm

Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 2

Next steps:

# cd /usr/src/
# git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
# cd x264
# ./configure --enable-shared

This gave an error about yasm, which was not the right version. I could have tried to compile that too, as shown on the Ubuntu forum, but impatiently decided to try the suggested disable option instead. So the x264 part which worked:

# ./configure --enable-shared --disable-asm
# make
# make install
# ldconfig

And finally, ffmpeg:

# cd /usr/src/ffmpeg/
# ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid
# make
# make install

I also had to remove the old ffmpeg version (aptitude purge ffmpeg) which I had installed some time before this, and finally did this:

# echo /usr/local/lib >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf
# ldconfig

Since I had a leftover libx264 installed with aptitude and which was too old, that caused a segmentation fault when I tried to encode with ffmpeg. After searching (aptitude search x264), I found i had to aptitude purge libx264-54 libx264-dev . Then, just to be sure, I re-did the ./configure, make clean, make, make install incantations for both x264 and ffmpeg.

In the end, ffmpeg is working. I suppose the --disable-asm option on x264 will make encoding slower, so it may be worth compiling yasm, and re-compiling x264 again.

Now that ffmpeg is working, the main problem is trying to understand it's myriad of incomprehensible and cryptically documented options.