How To Install FFmpeg on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Debian 10. 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. With FFmpeg, you can convert between various video and audio formats, set sample rates, capture streaming audio/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 Debian 10 (Buster) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• 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 Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

apt update
apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing FFmpeg on Debian 10.

To install FFmpeg type the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Verify the FFmpeg installation:

$ ffmpeg -version

ffmpeg version 4.1.4-2~deb10u1 Copyright (c) 2000-2020 the FFmpeg developers
built with gcc 8 (Debian 8.3.0-8)

To print all available FFmpeg encoders and decoders you can use:

ffmpeg -encoders
ffmpeg -decoders

Step 3. Basic FFmpeg Commands.

To convert an audio .amr file to .mp3 run the following command:

ffmpeg -i file1.amr file2.mp3

To check the media file information run the following command:

ffmpeg -i filename.mp3

You can also remove the audio stream from the video file using the below command:

ffmpeg -i inputvideo.mp4 -vn outputaudio.mp3

Congratulations! You have successfully installed FFmpeg. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing FFmpeg in Debian 10 Buster systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official FFmpeg website.