HOWTO: Install and use the latest FFmpeg and x264

[andrew.46]

Yes, that's perfect. Thanks Andrew. I'll add this to the guide soon.

I'll admit that I've never posted on a Usenet group before.

Courtesy of Janis Papana . comp.unix.shell is a great newsgroup with some very knowledgeable people, if you ever decide to indulge in Usenet the magic news server is individual.net, best usenet client is slrn and best proxy server is leafnode 2 IMHO!

[LinuxPhreak]

After compiling FFMPEG by following this tutorial I no longer can play DVD movies. I was able to play them before by installing the ubntu-restricted-extras and sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh. However after compiling the FFMPEG I no longer can play my DVD movies. Any idea why?

[qyot27]

After compiling FFMPEG by following this tutorial I no longer can play DVD movies. I was able to play them before by installing the ubntu-restricted-extras and sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh. However after compiling the FFMPEG I no longer can play my DVD movies. Any idea why?

I don't see why it would break, as libdvdcss should be separate from all of that. FFmpeg doesn't incorporate that library, but if you're using mplayer (which does use it) then you may be running into shared library issues - recompiling FFmpeg might have played a bit of havoc on mplayer. It may be fixable by just grabbing libdvdcss from Medibuntu.

You could try to recompile mplayer and see if that fixes it. http://repo.or.cz/w/mplayer-build.git makes the process near-totally painless:

git clone git://repo.or.cz/mplayer-build.git
cd mplayer-build
./init
./enable-mt or ./disable-mt (as needed; enable-mt is the default behavior now, but on single-core processors I'd disable it)
make
sudo make install (or a suitable checkinstall command)

You could further customize the FFmpeg, libass, or mplayer specific options before the 'make' step, but I don't think that's really necessary on Linux. It may be necessary to install libdvdcss-dev as well beforehand so it could find it.

[akemzo]

tried the above, it installed but still my vidoes don't play, something about ffmpeg version r19000 or above required, any idea?

[FakeOutdoorsman]

tried the above, it installed but still my vidoes don't play, something about ffmpeg version r19000 or above required, any idea?

That's not much to work with so I'm going to need more information before I can even make a guess:

• What version of Ubuntu are you using?
• What are you using to play the videos?
• Are there any error messages?
• What's telling you that r19000 or above required?

[kicker4546]

Hi,

this is my first post here at Ubuntu forums.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit version. I have tried updating my x264. I followed the instructions on page 1 and I get an error.

andy@g:~/x264$ make
gcc -o x264 x264.o input/input.o input/timecode.o input/raw.o input/y4m.o output/raw.o output/matroska.o output/matroska_ebml.o output/flv.o output/flv_bytestream.o filters/filters.o filters/video/video.o filters/video/source.o filters/video/internal.o filters/video/resize.o filters/video/cache.o filters/video/fix_vfr_pts.o filters/video/select_every.o filters/video/crop.o filters/video/depth.o input/thread.o input/lavf.o output/mp4.o libx264.a -lgpac_static -L.  -pthread -L/usr/local/lib -lavformat -lavcodec -ldl -lX11 -lXext -lXfixes -ljack -lasound -lxvidcore -lx264 -lvpx -lvorbisenc -lvorbis -ltheoraenc -ltheoradec -logg -lopencore-amrwb -lopencore-amrnb -lmp3lame -lfaac -lva -lm -lbz2 -lz -lavcore -lswscale -lavutil    -L/usr/local/lib -lswscale -lavutil    -lm -lpthread -s
/usr/local/lib/libavcodec.a(libx264.o): In function `X264_init':
/home/andy/ffmpeg/libavcodec/libx264.c:308: undefined reference to `x264_encoder_open_113'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [x264] error 1

What's that? Does any of you have an idea what's wrong here?

[Nom du Clavier]

Hi,

this is my first post here at Ubuntu forums.

I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit version. I have tried updating my x264. I followed the instructions on page 1 and I get an error.

andy@g:~/x264$ make
gcc -o x264 x264.o input/input.o input/timecode.o input/raw.o input/y4m.o output/raw.o output/matroska.o output/matroska_ebml.o output/flv.o output/flv_bytestream.o filters/filters.o filters/video/video.o filters/video/source.o filters/video/internal.o filters/video/resize.o filters/video/cache.o filters/video/fix_vfr_pts.o filters/video/select_every.o filters/video/crop.o filters/video/depth.o input/thread.o input/lavf.o output/mp4.o libx264.a -lgpac_static -L.  -pthread -L/usr/local/lib -lavformat -lavcodec -ldl -lX11 -lXext -lXfixes -ljack -lasound -lxvidcore -lx264 -lvpx -lvorbisenc -lvorbis -ltheoraenc -ltheoradec -logg -lopencore-amrwb -lopencore-amrnb -lmp3lame -lfaac -lva -lm -lbz2 -lz -lavcore -lswscale -lavutil    -L/usr/local/lib -lswscale -lavutil    -lm -lpthread -s
/usr/local/lib/libavcodec.a(libx264.o): In function `X264_init':
/home/andy/ffmpeg/libavcodec/libx264.c:308: undefined reference to `x264_encoder_open_113'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make: *** [x264] error 1

What's that? Does any of you have an idea what's wrong here?

It might be - and I'm not saying this is definitely the case - that this latest and greatest version which you're trying to compile had a patch applied which left it with this error. Usually care is taken so that each distinct version can be compiled, but things do slip through from time to time - the contributors to x264 are only human, after all.

You could try issuing the following commands:

git checkout HEAD~2
make

which will rewind a few change sets, thus hopefully bypassing this error - if that's what it's caused by. Then it tries again to build to see if this helped.

You'd then resume your usual commands from the HowTo where you left off, after the 'make' command, if indeed this error was now solved.

I hope this helps!

[kicker4546]

It might be - and I'm not saying this is definitely the case - that this latest and greatest version which you're trying to compile had a patch applied which left it with this error. Usually care is taken so that each distinct version can be compiled, but things do slip through from time to time - the contributors to x264 are only human, after all.

You could try issuing the following commands:

git checkout HEAD~2
make

which will rewind a few change sets, thus hopefully bypassing this error - if that's what it's caused by. Then it tries again to build to see if this helped.

You'd then resume your usual commands from the HowTo where you left off, after the 'make' command, if indeed this error was now solved.

I hope this helps!

First of all I wanna thank you for your reply. Hopefully this is going to work for me. I'll try later and let you know whether the issue is resolved that way.

Thanks again,

kicker

[FakeOutdoorsman]

Does any of you have an idea what's wrong here?

You probably have old x264 files interfering with the installation. Did you make sure to remove any x264 and libx264 packages first?

Edit: I bet it will work if you add --disable-lavf to your x264 ./configure. If that is the case then you need to also remove FFmpeg before updating x264. See the Updating FFmpeg and x264 section of the guide.

[kicker4546]

You probably have old x264 files interfering with the installation. Did you make sure to remove any x264 and libx264 packages first?

Edit: I bet it will work if you add --disable-lavf to your x264 ./configure. If that is the case then you need to also remove FFmpeg before updating x264. See the Updating FFmpeg and x264 section of the guide.

Yeah, exactly as you said. When I set --disable-lavf it worked pretty well. It seems I had to update ffmpeg too instead of only my x264.

I was able to successfully build it now. Thanks for your help!