How to Install ffmpeg and ffmpeg-php

In our testing, ffmpeg-php failed to install properly against the newest version of ffmpeg. Since lots of scripts which manipulate video  typically use the ffmpeg-php API to accesss ffmpeg functions, we recommend installing the exact versions referrenced in this guide.  If you choose to install a later version of ffmpeg, please be aware you may have difficulties installing ffmpeg-php (if you can at all).

In this guide, we will assume you are running CentOS 5.x. These instructions may work for other distributions as well.  Before you begin ensure you've installed these necessary prerequisite packages using yum:

wget
gcc
make
pkgconfig
php-devel
autoconf
libtool

To start, connect to your server via SSH as root.

Create an executable directory

Create a new executable directory by running these commands:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">export TMPDIR=/root/tmp-ffmpeg mkdir /root/tmp-ffmpeg</syntaxhighlight>

Let's create a directory for all of our install files. When we're done we can delete this entire directory to clean things up:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">mkdir /root/ffmpeg-install-files/ cd /root/ffmpeg-install-files/</syntaxhighlight>

We will begin installing the individual components that ffmpeg needs to operate properly.

Install Libogg

Let's start by downloading and installing libogg:

<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ogg/libogg-1.3.0.tar.gz tar -zxf libogg-1.3.0.tar.gz cd libogg-1.3.0/ ./configure --prefix=/usr make make install ldconfig cd ..</syntaxhighlight>

5) Install libvorbis:

wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/vorbis/libvorbis-1.3.3.tar.gz
tar -zxf libvorbis-1.3.3.tar.gz
cd libvorbis-1.3.3
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install
cd ..

6) Install LAME: 

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/lame/lame/3.99/lame-3.99.5.tar.gz
tar -zxf lame-3.99.5.tar.gz
cd lame-3.99.5
./configure --enable-shared --prefix=/usr
make
make install
cd ..

7) Install YASM

wget http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/releases/yasm-1.2.0.tar.gz
tar -zxf yasm-1.2.0.tar.gz
cd yasm-1.2.0
./configure
make
make install
cd ..

8) We'll now install ffmpeg itself.  As noted above, we recommend using the exact version listed here to ensure ffmpeg-php installs properly later on:

wget http://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-0.6.1.tar.gz
tar -zxf ffmpeg-0.6.1.tar.gz
cd ffmpeg-0.6.1
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-shared
make
make install
cd ..

9) At this point, you should verify that ffmpeg is working by running ffmpeg from the command line.  You should see something similar to this:

[root@ ]# ffmpeg
FFmpeg version 0.6.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
built on Sep 26 2012 17:11:54 with gcc 4.1.2 20080704 (Red Hat 4.1.2-52)
configuration: --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libvorbis --enable-shared
libavutil 50.15. 1 / 50.15. 1
libavcodec 52.72. 2 / 52.72. 2
libavformat 52.64. 2 / 52.64. 2
libavdevice 52. 2. 0 / 52. 2. 0
libswscale 0.11. 0 / 0.11. 0
Hyper fast Audio and Video encoder
usage: ffmpeg [options] [[infile options] -i infile]... {[outfile options] outfile}...

Use -h to get full help or, even better, run 'man ffmpeg'

If you see an error similar to:

ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libavdevice.so.52: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

you may need to help ffmpeg locate libavdevice.so.52.  To do so, we're going to open up our favorite text editor (nano, vim, etc.) and edit this file:

/etc/ld.so.conf

Add in the following line to the bottom:

/usr/local/lib

Save the file and then run:

ldconfig

You should now be able to execute ffmpeg from the command line as shown above and see the version information.

The base ffmpeg component is now installed, but ffmpeg is typically used on websites (like YouTube) for converting user content into the web-friendly flash format.  To do this, FLVTool2 must be installed which relies on Ruby for installation.

10) Let's install Ruby:

wget http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-p194.tar.gz
tar -zxf ruby-1.9.3-p194.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.3-p194
./configure
make
make install
cd ..

11)  With Ruby installed, we can now install FLVTool2:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17497/flvtool2-1.0.6.tgz
tar -xzvf flvtool2-1.0.6.tgz
cd flvtool2-1.0.6
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install
cd ..

12)  We now have ffmpeg and its necessary libraries installed.  To allow many web scripts to make use of ffmpeg, we'll need to install the ffmpeg-php API:

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffmpeg-php/files/ffmpeg-php/0.6.0/ffmpeg-php-0.6.0.tbz2/download
tar -jxf ffmpeg-php-0.6.0.tbz2
cd ffmpeg-php-0.6.0

Before we proceed to compile ffmpeg-php, we need to make some adjustments to ffmpeg-php's source code.  Within the 0.6.0 version of ffmpeg-php, there are coding errors that must be corrected.  In a text editor, open up this file:

ffmpeg_frame.c

Replace all instances of the PIX_FMT_RGBA32 with PIX_FMT_RGB32 and save.  We're now going to compile ffmpeg-php.  Run:

phpize
./configure
make
make install

Immediately after installing ffmpeg-php, you should see a path where it was installed similar to:

Installing shared extensions: /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/

Take note of this path. We're going to need it later when we load the ffmpeg.so module into your php.ini.

13)  Let's load the ffmpeg.so module for PHP so that web scripts have access to the ffmpeg-php API.  Open up your server's php.ini file.  If you're on a cPanel server, it's usually located at:

/usr/local/lib/php.ini

 Within the php.ini locate these lines:

; Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
extension_dir = "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613"

Usually the extension_dir already matches the path we saved in step 12.  If it's not correct, update it.  If you are using any other custom .so modules, you will want to copy them into that folder so that PHP can find them.

14) Scroll down to the "Dynamic Extensions" section, and add this line:

extension = ffmpeg.so

Save your php.ini and exit the editor.

15) We can now remove the source and tmp files we used during the installation and clear the TMPDIR variable by running these commands:

rm -rf /root/ffmpeg-install-files/
rm -rf /root/tmp-ffmpeg/
export TMPDIR=

ffmpeg and ffmpeg-php are now installed and ready for use.