FFmpeg Compilation Guide

This page contains a list of resources which describe the necessary steps required for compiling FFmpeg from scratch or with the help of build scripts and/or package managers.

All platforms

Read the Generic compilation guide, regardless of your platform. It provides generic compilation and installation instructions, including the use of configure .

CompilationGuide/vcpkg – vcpkg also aims to be portable accross all platforms. For windows it uses MinGW/MSYS compilation toolchain.

Linux

Alternative ways to obtain/compile ffmpeg under Linux:

macOS

Windows

CompilationGuide/MinGW – MinGW Compilation Guide for compiling FFmpeg with Windows/MinGW/MSYS.
CompilationGuide/CrossCompilingForWindows – Cross compiling for Windows is sometimes easier than using MSYS+MinGW.
CompilationGuide/WinRT – Compiling FFmpeg for Windows Apps (Windows 10 and Windows 8.1)
CompilationGuide/MSVC – Compiling FFmpeg using MSYS+MSVC, see also:
- Instructions on the reference web page
- Roxlu’s guide

Using external scripts or tools:

Media Autobuild Suite – Automatically build FFmpeg under Windows
Linuxbrew, which can be used with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
Chocolatey – a package manager for Windows with an FFmpeg package

Other Platforms

Performance Tips

There are numerous avenues to extract maximum performance out of FFmpeg when it is built from source. The following list describes some of them:

If using GCC/Clang , consider adding -march=native to —extra-cflags to make slightly better use of your hardware. Alternatively, for a more general solution, examine the —arch and —cpu options. Gains are variable, and usually quite small. However, this is usually even more safe than the above, and is thus listed here.

Depending on your use case, —enable-hardcoded-tables may be a useful option. It results in an increase of approximately 15% in the size of libavcodec , the main library impacted by this change. It enables savings in table generation time, done once at codec initialization, since by hardcoding the tables, they do not need to be computed at runtime. However, the savings are often negligible (
100k cycles is a typical number) especially when amortized over the entire encoding/decoding operation. By default, this is not enabled. Improvements are being made to the runtime initialization, and so over time, this option will have an impact on fewer and fewer codecs.

Other options may be found by examining ./configure —help .

Windows ffmpeg builds что это

FFmpeg only provides source code. Below are some links that provide it already compiled and ready to go.

Linux Packages

Linux Static Builds

Windows EXE Files

macOS

You can retrieve the source code through Git by using the command:

FFmpeg has always been a very experimental and developer-driven project. It is a key component in many multimedia projects and has new features added constantly. Development branch snapshots work really well 99% of the time so people are not afraid to use them.

Since FFmpeg is developed with Git, multiple repositories from developers and groups of developers are available.

Main FFmpeg Git repository https://git.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-web Main ffmpeg.org website repository https://git.ffmpeg.org/fateserver fate.ffmpeg.org server software repository Mirrors Mirror of the website repository Mirror of the FATE server repository

All FFmpeg releases are cryptographically signed with our public PGP key and should be verified for authenticity.

To verify a release:

Import our public key into your local keyring:
Download a release tarball and its corresponding signature.
Verify the signature:

Approximately every 6 months the FFmpeg project makes a new major release. Between major releases point releases will appear that add important bug fixes but no new features. Note that these releases are intended for distributors and system integrators. Users that wish to compile from source themselves are strongly encouraged to consider using the development branch (see above), this is the only version on which FFmpeg developers actively work. The release branches only cherry pick selected changes from the development branch, which therefore receives much more and much faster bug fixes such as additional features and security patches.

FFmpeg 4.4 «Rao»

4.4 was released on 2021-04-08. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 4.4 release branch, which was cut from master on 2021-04-08.