How To Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. 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. There’s also a great PHP package called ffmpeg-php that allows for easy use of FFmpeg from inside PHP scripts. In this tutorial, I will show you the easy way to install FFmpeg and ffmpeg-php (php extension).

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 an Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic Beaver).
• 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 Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing FFmpeg on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Method 1. Install FFmpeg using PPA:

You’ll need to add FFmpeg’s PPA (personal package archive) to your system:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-3
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ffmpeg libav-tools x264 x265

Method 2. Install FFmpeg using the default repository Ubuntu:

Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu is to use the apt command:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

To check for an installed FFmpeg version run:

$ ffmpeg -version
ffmpeg version 3.4.2-1build1 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers

Congratulations! You have successfully installed FFmpeg. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing FFmpeg on your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official FFmpeg website.

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