How To Install FFmpeg on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, FFmpeg is one of the best multimedia frameworks that can be used to encode, decode, transcode, and play nearly all multimedia files that have been created on any platform. FFmpeg compiles and runs on Linux, Mac OS, Microsoft Windows, BSD systems, and many more.

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 the FFmpeg on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
• 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 11 Bullseye

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

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing FFmpeg on Debian 11.

By default, FFmpeg is available in Debian’s default repositories, Now we run the following command to install FFmpeg to your Debian system:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

To verify the FFmpeg version, run:

ffmpeg -version

Step 3. Basic FFmpeg Commands.

The primary command usage for FFmpeg is as follows:

ffmpeg [global_options] {[input_file_options] -i input_url} …{[output_file_options] output_url} …

Example:

### Extract the audio from a video file ###

ffmpeg -i your-video.mp4 -vn audio.mp3

### Convert a video file from mp4 to webm ###

ffmpeg -i your-existingfile.mp4 newfile.webm

To print the FFmpeg help section:

ffmpeg -h

Congratulations! You have successfully installed FFmpeg. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the FFmpeg on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official FFmpeg website.