Installing FFMPEG on Ubuntu 16.04

FFmpeg-tool (Fast Forward MPEG) is a free and open source video and audio converter software that comprises a collection of tools and libraries for processing multimedia content for instance video, audio, subtitles and related metadata.
The software project was inspired by MPEG standards. It’s licensed under GNU / GPL license.

Some of the libraries include:

  • libavcodec: Contains a myriad of encoders and decoders for video and audio streams.
  • libavformat: This provides a framework for demultiplexing and multiplexing video and audio streams.
  • libavutil: includes hashers, decompressors and facilitates multimedia programming.
  • libavfilter: provides a framework for Audio and Video filtering.
  • libavdevice: Supports several playback devices and is charged with grabbing and rendering to input and output devices.
  • libswresample Facilitates audio mixing and audio conversion operations
  • libswscale implements high definition image scaling, pixel conversion tasks and color conversion.

Some tools include:

  • ffmpeg is a tool for manipulating, converting and streaming multimedia content.
  • ffplay is a simplified multimedia player.
  • ffprobe This is a minimalistic tool for searching multimedia content.
  • ffserver This is a streaming server tool for live broadcasts.
  • Other tools include qt-faststart, ismindex and aviocat

Installing FFMPEG on Ubuntu 16.04

Login as root and update the system.

apt-get update

Install FFmpeg

apt-get install ffmpeg

Once installed, run

man ffmpeg

This gives you more detailed information about FFmpeg

Finding the version of FFmpeg

 ffmpeg -version
Converting a video file to another file format

Converting mp4 to avi format

ffmpeg -i input sample1.mp4 sample1.avi

Concerting flv to MPEG

ffmpeg -i input sample1.flv sample2.mpeg

mov to mp4

ffmpeg -i sample1.mov -vcodec h264 -acodec aac -strict -2 sample1.mp4

Converting Video to Audio

ffmpeg -i sample1.mp4 -vn -ab 320 sample2.mp3

320 is the bitrate here.

Compressing video files

ffmpeg -i sample1.mp4 -b 1000000 sample2.mp4

similarly, 1000000 is the bitrate

Compressing audio files

ffmpeg -i sample1.mp3 -ab 128 sample1.mp3

About James

Hey there! This is James, a Linux administrator and a tech enthusiast. I love experimenting with various distributions of Linux and keeping tabs on what's new in the Linux world.
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