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# Installing FFMpeg on CentOS/RedHat 5.x successfully
- URL: https://helpmonks.com/blog/installing-ffmpeg-on-centosredhat-5x-successfully/
- Published: 2009-02-24T00:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-06T20:08:03.000Z
- Description: My primary Linux distribution of choice is CentOS . CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by Re
- Author: Nitai
- Tags: email marketing

My primary Linux distribution of choice is [CentOS](http://www.centos.org/?ref=helpmonks.com). CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by RedHat. Thus CentOS is merely speaking a copy of RedHat and provides the same stability and security.

The trade off with stability and security is, that you mostly run packages which are not cutting edge and thus you run into issues where you need the cutting edge. This is the case with FFMpeg.

There is a DAG repository that give you FFMpeg in the yum installation, but that version is not working with libx264 or libfaac and still uses the older way of and might break some applications.

Thus I set out to find the best way to install FFMpeg. Since FFMpeg depends on a lot of external libraries we first have to install this external libraries.

Please follow the below steps one by one to install FFMpeg on CentOS/RedHat 5.x. successfully. Some of these libraries might be older (some even from 2008), thought I used what worked best for me and were stable in production environment.

**Lets create a directory first**  
mkdir -p /opt/ffmpeg-packages  
cd /opt/ffmpeg-packages

**Installing FAAD2**  
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz  
tar zxf faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz  
cd faad2  
autoreconf -vif  
./configure –disable-drm –disable-mpeg4ip  
make && make install

**Installing FAAC**  
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faac-1.26.tar.gz  
tar zxfv faac-1.26.tar.gz  
cd faac  
./bootstrap  
./configure –disable-mp4v2  
make && make install

**Installing LAME**  
wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.98b8.tar.gz  
tar zxfv lame-3.98b8.tar.gz  
cd lame-3.98b8  
./configure  
make && make install

**Installing yasm**  
wget http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/releases/yasm-0.7.0.tar.gz  
tar zfvx yasm-0.7.0.tar.gz  
cd yasm-0.7.0  
./configure  
make && make install

**Installing x264**

FFMpeg requires that you get the latest x264 codec. Thus we use the latest from their GIT repository.

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git  
cd x264  
./configure –enable-shared –prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install

**Installing Xvid**  
wget [http://downloads.xvid.org/downloads/xvidcore-1.2.1.tar.gz](http://downloads.xvid.org/downloads/xvidcore-1.2.1.tar.gz?ref=helpmonks.com)  
tar zxfv xvidcore-1.2.1.tar.gz  
cd xvidcore/build/generic  
./configure  
make && make install

**Installing FFmpeg**

For FFMPEG, you will need to get the latest out of SVN.

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg  
cd ffmpeg  
./configure –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-nonfree –enable-postproc  
–enable-libfaad –enable-avfilter –enable-pthreads –enable-libxvid  
–enable-libx264 –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libfaac –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay  
make  
make install

The “make” of FFmpeg can take up to 5 minutes, so please be patience. I also disable “FFServer” and “FFplay” on my servers. Please adjust to your environment.

Hope this helps.