How To Install FFmpeg on CentOS 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, FFmpeg is a cross-platform solution for streaming audio and video as well as recording and conversion. It contains a set of shared audio and video libraries such as libavcodec, libavformat, and libavutil. With FFmpeg, you can convert between various video and audio formats, set sample rates, capture streaming audio or video, and resize videos.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of FFmpeg on a CentOS 8 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install FFmpeg on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf clean all
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Adds EPEL and RPM Fusion repository on CentOS.

We need to enable the EPEL repository and RPM Fusion on your system.

sudo dnf install https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf localinstall --nogpgcheck https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/el/rpmfusion-free-release-8.noarch.rpm
sudo dnf install --nogpgcheck https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/el/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-8.noarch.rpm

Step 3. Installing FFmpeg on CentOS 8.

Once you’ve added EPEL and RPM Fusion repositories, run the following commands to install FFmpeg:

sudo dnf install http://rpmfind.net/linux/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/s/SDL2-2.0.10-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf install ffmpeg
sudo dnf install ffmpeg-devel

Verify the FFmpeg installation:

rpm -qi ffmpeg
ffmpeg -version

Step 4. Using FFmpeg.

The usage of FFmpeg depends on individual projects and the desired output. Refer to the official FFmpeg documentation for an in-depth description of its features and examples. If you want to learn more about FFmpeg, input:

ffmpeg -h

Congratulations! You have successfully installed FFmpeg. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing FFmpeg in CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official FFmpeg website.