How to Install FFmpeg in Linux

FFmpeg is so important if you are planning to run a video website with streaming with conversion of video files to different video formats although you might want to upgrade to dedicated server hosting because it takes a huge amount of bandwidth. This tutorial is intended for Centos/Redhat versions of Linux where any novice user can install ffmpeg without compiling the source which is a more traditional way of installing the FFmpeg software on linux servers. In this tutorial i will show you the easy way to install ffmpeg and ffmpeg-php (php extension) with just yum rather than compiling ffmpeg from source files.

 

 

FFmpeg (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu)
Mplayer + Mencoder (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html)
Flv2tool (http://inlet-media.de/flvtool2)
Libogg + Libvorbis (http://www.xiph.org/downloads)
LAME MP3 Encoder (http://lame.sourceforge.net)
FlowPlayer – A Free Flash Video Player – http://flowplayer.org/

Installing FFMpeg

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

If you get package not found, then you will need to add few lines in the yum repository for dag packages installation. Create a file named dag.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d with the following contents on it

[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1

then

yum install ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

If everything is fine, then the installation should proceed smoothly. If not you will get something like warning GPG public key missing .

Common Errors

To fix rpmforge GPG key warning:

rpm -Uhv http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/i386/rpmforge/RPMS/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

For more information refer to this faq depending on Centos version

Missing Dependency Error:

If you get missing dependency error like shown below, in the middle of ffmpeg installation

Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package ffmpeg
Error: Missing Dependency: libtheora.so.0(libtheora.so.1.0) is needed by package ffmpeg
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package ffmpeg
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package imlib2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package a52dec
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package imlib2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package gsm
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package x264
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package xvidcore
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package lame
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package a52dec
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package faad2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package x264
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package lame
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package xvidcore
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package faac
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package faad2
Error: Missing Dependency: libgif.so.4 is needed by package imlib2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package faac
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package gsm
Error: Missing Dependency: libpng12.so.0(PNG12_0) is needed by package imlib2
Error: Missing Dependency: rtld(GNU_HASH) is needed by package libmp4v2
Error: Missing Dependency: libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.4) is needed by package libmp4v2

then most commonly you have GLIB 2.3 installed instead of GLIB 2.4 version. To check the current GLIB version installed on your server. just use

yum list glib*

and it should list the latest GLIB package version.

The reason i was getting this error was my rpmforge packages was pointed to centos 5 versions instead of centos 4.6.

To fix dependency error:

To fix this error, you might need to check your rpmforge packages compatible to the release of your existing CentOS version.
Check the file /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo and it should look like for Centos 4.6(Final). If you have lines like http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el5/en/mirrors-rpmforge you might need to make changes to the rpmforge.repos like shown below

Note: Backup the original rpmforge.repo file before you edit its content.

[rpmforge]
name = Red Hat Enterprise $releasever – RPMforge.net – dag
#baseurl = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/$basearch/dag
mirrorlist = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el4/en/mirrors-rpmforge
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge
enabled = 1
protect = 0
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1

To know what linux type and version you are running

cat /etc/redhat-release

Once this is done, do again yum install ffmpeg.

This trick resolved the problem in my linux box running Centos 4.6 and this is the only way i found to install ffmpeg using yum.

To check the FFmpeg working:

Finally, check the ffmpeg whether it is working or not.

> ffmpeg
> ffmpeg -formats
> ffmpeg –help
// This lists path of mpeg, its modules and other path information
ffmpeg -i Input.file Output.file

To check what audi/video formats are supported

ffmpeg -formats > ffmpeg-format.txt

Open the ffmpeg-formats.txt to see the ooutput

D means decode
E means encode
V means video
A means audio
T = Truncated

XEphem on Ubuntu

XEphem is an outstanding software for astronomers.It is written in C and there aren’t any packages built for it so you have to compile it using the source codes.
When building on Ubuntu, it is most likely that you’ll get some error messages, because need some libraries not included in Ubuntu by default.
Download the source code and extract it.

$ wget http://97.74.56.125/free/xephem-3.7.4.tar.gz

$ tar -xvf xephem-3.7.4.tar.gz

Before compiling, we need these packages installed.

$ sudo apt-get install libmotif3 libmotif-dev x11proto-print-dev libxp-dev libxmu-dev

If you don’t install these packages, you’ll get errors during compilation from various files, like aavso.c

Now let’s compile!

$ cd xephem-3.7.4/GUI/xephem

$ make MOTIF=../../libXm/linux86

(NOTE : If you’re using an x86_64 system, use MOTIF=/usr/lib as make the option since the libXm delivered with xephem won’t do any good for you)
The rest is as stated in the INSTALL file.

how to get the size of a folder in Linux CLI

It seems like a simple request…and it mostly is. But if you want to get the size of a folder – including sub-folders – in Linux from the command line, you need to use the du command. The simplest trick (thanks linuxforums.org) to get the total size without listing all the sub-folders is to use the following:

du -h | grep -v ‘/’ | awk ‘{print $1}’