Installing ffmpeg on ec2

ffmpeg_ec2.txt

INSTALLING FFMPEG ON EC2

I just received this excellent how-to from AWS Support and it worked for me on my Amazon Linux AMI release 2013.09. It would probably work this way for any Linux distribution

1. SSH into your instance and become root
sudo su -

2. Go to the the /usr/local/bin directory
cd /usr/local/bin

3. Inside the /usr/local/bin directory, create an "ffmpeg" directory
mkdir ffmpeg

4. Go into the new directory
cd ffmpeg

5. Go to static build directory at http://ffmpeg.gusari.org/static/64bit/ and pick the 
latest version of FFMPEG - as of this writing, it was ffmpeg.static.64bit.2014-02-16.tar.gz
wget http://ffmpeg.gusari.org/static/64bit/ffmpeg.static.64bit.2014-02-16.tar.gz

6. The file should now be in /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg. Untar it...
tar -xzf ffmpeg.static.64bit.2014-02-16.tar.gz

5. Run it and check what the latest version is 
./ffmpeg -version

The output should look something like this
ffmpeg version N-60675-g8fe1076
built on Feb 16 2014 05:45:47 with gcc 4.6 (Debian 4.6.3-1)
configuration: --prefix=/root/ffmpeg-static/64bit --extra-cflags='-I/root/ffmpeg-
static/64bit/include -static' --extra-ldflags='-L/root/ffmpeg-static/64bit/lib -static' --
extra-libs='-lxml2 -lexpat -lfreetype' --enable-static --disable-shared --disable-ffserver --
disable-doc --enable-bzlib --enable-zlib --enable-postproc --enable-runtime-cpudetect --
enable-libx264 --enable-gpl --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libmp3lame --
enable-gray --enable-libass --enable-libfreetype --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libspeex --
enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-version3 --enable-libvpx
libavutil 52. 64.100 / 52. 64.100
libavcodec 55. 52.102 / 55. 52.102
libavformat 55. 32.101 / 55. 32.101
libavdevice 55. 9.101 / 55. 9.101
libavfilter 4. 1.102 / 4. 1.102
libswscale 2. 5.101 / 2. 5.101
libswresample 0. 17.104 / 0. 17.104
libpostproc 52. 3.100 / 52. 3.100

6. If you want to be able to execute FFMPEG from any directory, simply create a symlink into /usr/bin like this:
ln -s /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg

The first part (/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg/ffmpeg) is where the file is located after I untarred 
the file. The second part (/usr/bin/ffmpeg) is where we want the symlink to go

Now, you should be able to run the command "ffmpeg" from anywhere