Installing FFMPEG On OSX (Mavericks)

ffmpegI already wrote a post on How To Install FFMPEG On A Webserver and when I wanted to install FFMPEG on my Macbook Pro I assumed I could follow the same procedure but I ran into some problems. First, there’s no WGET command on OSX, well not by default anyway.

Once I solved that problem, the FFMPEG installation started but failed because the Libvpx library installation failed. So hereby a step-by-step installation instruction which probably also works on previous versions of OSX.

Step 1: Xcode Command Line Tools for Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks

Xcode Command Line Tools are part of Xcode which is a suite of development tools and libraries for OSX. Before you start, first check whether Xcode is already installed:

If you see:

Then just go to the next step, Xcode is already installed but you might want to update it to the latest version through the App Store.

To install Xcode just type a command that requires Xcode:

You’ll get this popup:

installing-xcode-step1

Just click “Install”:

installing-xcode-step2

Homebrew — MacPorts driving you to drink? Try Homebrew!

To solve the missing WGET command, you have to install Homebrew which “installs the stuff you need that Apple didn’t“.

If you have installed Macports you probably better remove it:

Next, this will do the trick of installing Homebrew but you still need to install the WGET command:

Installing FFMPEG

The only problem that’s left is that the Libvpx part of the FFMPEG installation script kinda blows it, which can be solve by replacing that specific part with this:

So this will result in this installation script:

The script will at some points create some warnings mainly caused by unused options but that won’t effect the installation. Simply copy this script (to any location) on your web server, name it build_ffmpeg.sh and run this command:

If you want to check whether the installation was successful, type:

This should give the following output:

Edit Your .BASH_PROFILE

To be able to run FFMPEG at run time you need to make the following settings which you can also put into into your $HOME/.bash_profile file to set them automatically at login.

Step 1: Start Terminal

Step 2: Edit .bash_profile

This will open the (hidden) file .bash_profile or create a new one if it doesn’t exist.

Step 3: Make the changes and save

Now you can make a simple change to the file. Paste these lines of code to change your Terminal prompt.

Next save the file by clicking ctrl+o followed by ctrl+x to exit the editor.
To immediately activate your changes type source .bash_profile
That’s all!

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