How To Install FFmpeg on Linux Mint 19

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Linux Mint 19. For those of you who didn’t know, FFmpeg is open-source software (also a command-line tool) for transcoding multimedia files. 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 Linux Mint 19 (Tricia) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 19 (Tricia).
• 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).
• An active internet connection.
• 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 Linux Mint 19

Step 1. Before running the tutorial below, 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 install software-properties-common

Step 2. Installing FFmpeg on Linux Mint 19.

Now add JonathanF’s FFmpeg-4 repository to your system:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-4

Then, run the following command to install FFmpeg:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Verify the installation by running the ffmpeg -version a command which will print the FFmpeg version:

ffmpeg -version

Step 4. Using FFmpeg.

The usage of FFmpeg depends on individual projects and 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 Linux Mint 19 Tricia systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official FFmpeg website.