Introduction

This tutorial is mostly sourced from this article on building ffmpeg for RaspberryPi and also this one showing how to use checkinstall. While derek molloy has an excellent article on compiling ffmpeg from source, what he sets out there is compiling ffmpeg on the beaglebone itself which, besides being really slow, is not possible on my older beaglebone white with its lesser 256MB of RAM. The OS would always end up killing the build process after some time throwing an ‘Out of Memory Exception’.

Set up a cross compilation environment

The first step will be to set up a build environment for the beaglebone which means to set up a toolchain that targets the beaglebone hardware. I’ve posted a detailed guide on this here.

Download ffmpeg

For this guide, I used ffmpeg 2.6 which was the release at the time of writing. You can either download the latest release from http://ffmpeg.org/download.html or clone from one of their git repository mirrors listed on the bottom of the aforementioned page (such as git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git).

Compile

If you have any shared libraries that need to be linked to ffmpeg, install them into a temp folder like $HOME/arm-builds/ffmpeg. For my purposes, I’ll be building ffmpeg with libaacplus. Now move to the source folder on the host machine and configure the package.

./configure --enable-cross-compile --cross-prefix=${CCPREFIX} --arch=armhf \
--target-os=linux --prefix=$HOME/arm-builds/ffmpeg/ --enable-nonfree \
--enable-libaacplus --extra-cflags="-I$HOME/arm-builds/ffmpeg/include" \
--extra-ldflags="-L$HOME/arm-builds/ffmpeg/lib" --extra-libs=-ldl \
--enable-shared

If you don’t need to build ffmpeg without libaacplus or any additional libraries you can scrap the --enable-libaacplus --extra-libs --extra-ldflags --extra-cflags --enable-nonfree.

Now go ahead and do a make

make

This will take some time. Once that’s compiled we copy the whole stinkin’ build folder to the beaglebone by way of rsync,scp, or whatever you prefer. Once that’s copied, we will install the package using checkinstall. Checkinstall is clutch because it actually builds a debian package of the compiled code and then installs that which makes it easy to uninstall later (it can even be redistributed this way). Move into the copied source folder and run the following command

sudo checkinstall --pkgname=ffmpeg --pkgversion="5:$(./version.sh)" --backup=no --deldoc=yes --default

That’s it!

ffmpeg should be installed now and you’re also left with a redistributable ffmpeg.deb package.