HOWTO: Install and use the latest FFmpeg and x264

[andrew.46]

Hi FakeOutdoorsman,

How did you figure this out? This is good news because the directory making seemed that it should have been unnecessary. I tested it out on both Hardy and Intrepid and all seemed just fine.

Good news . The problem with checkinstall was a fairly big thing with my 'other' distro (slackware) where because of this problem checkinstall was actually removed from the distro completely. Because I have not used checkinstall extensively on either distro it took me a little while to make the connection. I am getting a little slow in my old age .

I somewhat followed the Ubuntu versioning convention to prevent annoying updates as mentioned earlier by Ng Oon-Ee. Not sure if there is any downside to that or not, but it seems to work.

Actually Ng Oon-Ee's versioning info looks like better idea than the way I proposed anyway. I shall investigate the naming conventions for the repository MPlayer and make a similar change. From memory MPlayer comes as Release Candidate only so it will be a little different perhaps; great idea though!

When I read through the man page for checkinstall I saw the possibility to 'pre-fill' the checkinstall fields which I thought would be perfect for guides such as MPlayer and ffmpeg which are both complex enough.

All the best,

Andrew

[seuzy13]

I have a problem on the first step. When I try to purge all those packages, apt wants to also remove mplayer, vlc, avidemux, mencoder, ogmrip, mythtv, and a bunch of other important things. How can I remove just those several things that I wanted to?

[kevdog]

I may have said this once, but this is a really nice and well written guide. The edits are tremendous! Please keep maintaining this guide and write other guides if you get a chance

[cloggie]

Hi,

I must be the dummest fool around. I did follow your tutorial to the letter, went over my Synaptic to see if it was all deleted, and it was, so I did not have any ffmpeg or x264 stuff left, as far as I could see.
But upon installing the newly made x264 it gives me an error, saying "Failed".
The logfile tells me this:
(Reading database ... 124549 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace x264 1:0.svn20071224-0.0ubuntu1 (using .../x264_1:0.svn20081122-0.0ubuntu1-1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement x264 ...
dpkg: error processing /home/will/x264/x264_1:0.svn20081122-0.0ubuntu1-1_i386.deb (--install):
trying to overwrite `/usr/lib/pkgconfig/x264.pc', which is also in package libx264-dev
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/home/will/x264/x264_1:0.svn20081122-0.0ubuntu1-1_i386.deb

On another note, I found that libx264 for instance was still installed, but when I wanted to uninstal it through Synaptic, I also saw that al the other stuff as mentioned by Seauzy13 was going to get deleted. So I halted this . But how further?

So, what is going wrong here, what am I missing?
Could you please help me?

Thanks, Will.

[FakeOutdoorsman]

I have a problem on the first step. When I try to purge all those packages, apt wants to also remove mplayer, vlc, avidemux, mencoder, ogmrip, mythtv, and a bunch of other important things. How can I remove just those several things that I wanted to?

This is the result of me making assumptions and not testing well enough. I thought libx264-59 (or libx264-57 in Hardy) would cause issues with the compiled x264, but it doesn't seem to as far as I can tell. It used to conflict because the shared libraries used to have the same name at one time (I think), but not anymore.

So, to summarize, you can keep libx264-59, which is what all those other programs require. Unfortunately, those other programs are probably not going to use your compiled x264 to encode with (another assumption) unless you compile them too. Alternatively, you could make a symlink to the new x264 libraries, but that's a messy way of doing things and not generally recommended and may not actually work (although I admit to doing it sometimes).

I may have said this once, but this is a really nice and well written guide. The edits are tremendous! Please keep maintaining this guide and write other guides if you get a chance

Thanks, kevdog. I have some others planned, but this one is the most interesting so far.

...
On another note, I found that libx264 for instance was still installed, but when I wanted to uninstal it through Synaptic, I also saw that al the other stuff as mentioned by Seauzy13 was going to get deleted. So I halted this . But how further?

So, what is going wrong here, what am I missing?
Could you please help me?

You did everything right, but the guide was flawed. It's updated now. It seems as if libx264-dev is installed on your machine. You could probably remove it without any issues because I don't think it has any dependent packages:

sudo apt-get remove libx264-dev

Then try x264 to install x264 again. Starting with this line:

sudo checkinstall --pkgname=x264 --pkgversion "1:0.svn`date +%Y%m%d`-0.0ubuntu1"

[DilfATX]

Excellent guide and I felt confident everything was going to go well..

but I got this error

libfaac doesn't support this output format!

and am not sure how to change that? when I clicked on the mp4 file it was 0 bytes after all that time going through its process.

here is the whole break down

rey@dilfATX:~$ ./264encode.sh 00060.MTS output.mp4
FFmpeg version SVN-r15908, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libx264
  libavutil     49.12. 0 / 49.12. 0
  libavcodec    52. 3. 0 / 52. 3. 0
  libavformat   52.23. 1 / 52.23. 1
  libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
  libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
  built on Nov 22 2008 12:41:12, gcc: 4.3.2
Input #0, mpegts, from '00060.MTS':
  Duration: 00:02:43.64, start: 1.033367, bitrate: 17333 kb/s
  Program 1 
    Stream #0.0[0x1011]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 29.97 tb(r)
    Stream #0.1[0x1100]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
Output #0, mp4, to '/dev/null':
    Stream #0.0: Video: libx264, yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], q=10-51, pass 1, 512 kb/s, 29.97 tb(c)
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]using SAR=1/1
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Slow
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]profile Main, level 4.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame= 9808 fps=  7 q=-1.0 Lsize=       0kB time=327.23 bitrate=   0.0kbits/s    .0kbits/s    
video:20584kB audio:0kB global headers:1kB muxing overhead -99.999995%
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]slice I:40    Avg QP:35.23  size: 27162
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]slice P:4151  Avg QP:37.79  size:  3983
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]slice B:5617  Avg QP:39.90  size:   613
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]consecutive B-frames: 16.9% 23.6%  4.9% 25.7% 28.7%  0.2%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]mb I  I16..4: 82.7%  0.0% 17.3%
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]mb P  I16..4:  8.6%  0.0%  0.0%  P16..4: 10.3%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%  0.0%    skip:81.1%
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]mb B  I16..4:  0.3%  0.0%  0.0%  B16..8:  4.1%  0.0%  0.0%  direct: 0.3%  skip:95.4%  L0:32.6% L1:66.6% BI: 0.8%
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]final ratefactor: 38.76
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]SSIM Mean Y:0.8341146
[libx264 @ 0xa169990]kb/s:514.8
FFmpeg version SVN-r15908, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libx264
  libavutil     49.12. 0 / 49.12. 0
  libavcodec    52. 3. 0 / 52. 3. 0
  libavformat   52.23. 1 / 52.23. 1
  libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
  libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
  built on Nov 22 2008 12:41:12, gcc: 4.3.2
Input #0, mpegts, from '00060.MTS':
  Duration: 00:02:43.64, start: 1.033367, bitrate: 17333 kb/s
  Program 1 
    Stream #0.0[0x1011]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 29.97 tb(r)
    Stream #0.1[0x1100]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
Output #0, mp4, to 'output.mp4':
    Stream #0.0: Video: libx264, yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], q=10-51, pass 2, 512 kb/s, 29.97 tb(c)
    Stream #0.1: Audio: libfaac, stereo, s16, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
  Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
[libx264 @ 0xa40a990]using SAR=1/1
[libx264 @ 0xa40a990]using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Slow
[libx264 @ 0xa40a990]profile High, level 4.0
[libfaac @ 0xa40c6c0]libfaac doesn't support this output format!
Error while opening codec for output stream #0.1 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height
rey@dilfATX:~$

I would gladly take any suggestions

[FakeOutdoorsman]

Excellent guide and I felt confident everything was going to go well..

but I got this error

libfaac doesn't support this output format!

This is a new error for me. I tried converting a 5.1 channel ac3 file and got no errors. I don't know why, but it looks like libfaac isn't getting the audio rate. Let's cut out the video and use the same audio settings as the script to see if the error can be replicated:

ffmpeg -i 00060.MTS -vn -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -f mp4 output.mp4

[cloggie]

I got basically the same error as DilFATX.

I used your line, but then got this:

will@will-laptop:~/Documents$ ffmpeg -i 100_2943.MOV -vn -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -f mp4 output.mp4
FFmpeg version SVN-rUNKNOWN, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-pthreads --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libogg --enable-libgsm --enable-dc1394 --disable-debug --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaadbin --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac --enable-xvid --enable-x264 --enable-liba52 --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb --enable-shared --prefix=/usr
libavutil version: 1d.49.3.0
libavcodec version: 1d.51.38.0
libavformat version: 1d.51.10.0
built on Jul 29 2008 18:21:25, gcc: 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu7)

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 29.97 (30000/1001) -> 15.00 (3468000/231150)
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '100_2943.MOV':
Duration: 00:00:57.7, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 1874 kb/s
Stream #0.0(eng): Video: h263, yuv420p, 352x288, 15.00 fps(r)
Stream #0.1(eng): Audio: pcm_mulaw, 8000 Hz, mono, 64 kb/s
Unknown codec 'libfaac'


I thought, wtf, I know libfaac is installed. Because when I do this:

will@will-laptop:~/Documents$ whereis libfaac
libfaac: /usr/lib/libfaac.la /usr/lib/libfaac.so /usr/lib/libfaac.a /usr/local/lib/libfaac.la /usr/local/lib/libfaac.so /usr/local/lib/libfaac.a
I get to see the whole thing, isn't it?
So why am I getting the same problem then? I mean, it should be possible to convert .mov into mp4 right? When I go from a mpg file to mp4 I don't get this problem, even when I do a straight conversion with ffmpeg, like this:

will@will-laptop:~/Documents$ ffmpeg -i rooftoporg.mpg rooftprogsunday.mp4
FFmpeg version SVN-rUNKNOWN, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-pthreads --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libogg --enable-libgsm --enable-dc1394 --disable-debug --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaadbin --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac --enable-xvid --enable-x264 --enable-liba52 --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb --enable-shared --prefix=/usr
libavutil version: 1d.49.3.0
libavcodec version: 1d.51.38.0
libavformat version: 1d.51.10.0
built on Jul 29 2008 18:21:25, gcc: 4.2.3 (Ubuntu 4.2.3-2ubuntu7)
Input #0, mpeg, from 'rooftoporg.mpg':
Duration: 00:03:21.5, start: 0.726700, bitrate: 1401 kb/s
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg1video, yuv420p, 352x240, 1150 kb/s, 29.97 fps(r)
Stream #0.1[0x1c0]: Audio: mp2, 44100 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
Output #0, mp4, to 'rooftprogsunday.mp4':
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 352x240, q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 29.97 fps(c)
Stream #0.1: Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, 64 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame= 6075 q=18.2 Lsize= 6860kB time=202.6 bitrate= 277.4kbits/s
video:5161kB audio:1580kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 1.760572%
will@will-laptop:~/Documents$


So could it have something to do with the type of input file maybe?

[DilfATX]

This is a new error for me. I tried converting a 5.1 channel ac3 file and got no errors. I don't know why, but it looks like libfaac isn't getting the audio rate. Let's cut out the video and use the same audio settings as the script to see if the error can be replicated:

ffmpeg -i 00060.MTS -vn -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -f mp4 output.mp4

I tried that in terminal and got this

rey@dilfATX:~$ ffmpeg -i 00060.MTS -vn -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -ac 2 -f mp4 output.mp4
FFmpeg version SVN-r15908, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libx264
  libavutil     49.12. 0 / 49.12. 0
  libavcodec    52. 3. 0 / 52. 3. 0
  libavformat   52.23. 1 / 52.23. 1
  libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
  libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
  built on Nov 22 2008 12:41:12, gcc: 4.3.2
Input #0, mpegts, from '00060.MTS':
  Duration: 00:02:43.64, start: 1.033367, bitrate: 17333 kb/s
  Program 1 
    Stream #0.0[0x1011]: Video: h264, yuv420p, 1920x1080 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 29.97 tb(r)
    Stream #0.1[0x1100]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5.1, s16, 448 kb/s
Output #0, mp4, to 'output.mp4':
    Stream #0.0: Audio: libfaac, stereo, s16, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
[libfaac @ 0x8b56990]libfaac doesn't support this output format!
Error while opening codec for output stream #0.0 - maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height
rey@dilfATX:~$

Can I change the output format for "libfaac"? if so to what? and how? Thanks greatly for your help on this I didn't expect such a quick reply to my question

[andrew.46]

Hi:

Can I change the output format for "libfaac"? if so to what? and how? Thanks greatly for your help on this I didn't expect such a quick reply to my question

I am at the wrong computer at the moment but instead of mp4 have you tried m4a? It would be a bit fussy of ffmpeg to insist on this but worth a try.

Andrew

Edit: Not for the first time I am talking rubbish . I fired up my Ubuntu partition and the commandline worked fine:

andrew@skamandros:~/Desktop$ ffmpeg -i rappin.wav -vn -acodec libfaac \
-ab 128k -ac 2 -f mp4 output.mp4
FFmpeg version SVN-r15918, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
  configuration: --prefix=/usr --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc 
--enable-pthreads --enable-libamr-nb --enable-libamr-wb --enable-libmp3lame 
--enable-libschroedinger --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-libfaac
  libavutil     49.12. 0 / 49.12. 0
  libavcodec    52. 3. 0 / 52. 3. 0
  libavformat   52.23. 1 / 52.23. 1
  libavdevice   52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
  libpostproc   51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
  built on Nov 24 2008 07:32:33, gcc: 4.3.2
Input #0, wav, from 'rappin.wav':
  Duration: 00:00:19.95, bitrate: 31 kb/s
    Stream #0.0: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono, s16, 32 kb/s
Output #0, mp4, to 'output.mp4':
    Stream #0.0: Audio: libfaac, 22050 Hz, stereo, s16, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
size=     153kB time=19.88 bitrate=  62.9kbits/s    
video:0kB audio:149kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 2.636834%