FFmpeg -- here we go again

My two other posts on FFmpeg entitled “Installing ffmpeg on CentOS 5” and “SELinux with ffmpeg” already explained in deep how to get FFmpeg up and running.

Unfortunately, today one of our servers just reported a plain:

ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libfaad.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

when trying to run any ffmpeg command. Now, what was that and foremost why? Especially, since it worked 2 days ago. I guess, “someone” must have done some update. In any case, it was a good lesson to reinstall ffmpeg and bring all libraries up to date.

So, since my last installation, some things must have obviously been changed behind the scenes, because when I tried to configure ffmpeg with the same commands I run into another error which was:

libx264 version must be >= 0.78

Even thought I installed x264 from the latest GIT repository it still showed me the above error! Looking around the Videolan.org website I saw that the nightly snapshots differ in size a lot. So, either their nightly script is broken or something else is going on. In any case, I went with the x264-snapshot-20091031-2245 one.

Configured and installed it. Then did a “ldconfig -v” (in order to see that it really took the latest one) and went on with the ffmpeg configuration (I took the latest code from SVN (Revision 20525)) and low and behold, everything compiled and installed without problem.

Important: Update your libraries after the installation of ffmpeg again with “ldconfig”! Else you will get the “ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: ….” error again.