How to handle custom build of ffmpeg with synaptic?

Mountain Man · 11-06-2009, 05:21 PM

I want to use the latest SVN of ffmpeg because it works better with the .mp4 files my camcorder creates. I just updated to 9.10, and instead of installing the version of ffmpeg from the repos I downloaded and compiled/installed the latest SVN from source. ffmpeg works fine converting my digital camera files, but there are some other packages I want to install which require ffmpeg. How should I handle this? Should I uncheck ffmpeg when synaptic says it wants to install it (doing the same for each app)? Or should I let synaptic install the version of ffmpeg in the repositories and then re run "make install"?

jay73 · 11-06-2009, 07:32 PM

I think the only proper way is to build your compiled program into a deb so synaptic will be aware it exists. Alternatively, you may be able to find a ready-made deb on launchpad.

knudfl · 11-07-2009, 10:58 AM

.. And if you don't want to create a genuine ' .deb '
package, just copy all installed ffmpeg files into a
directory tree inside a new empty folder in /home/ ,
e.g. /home/'username'/tmp/1/usr///
cd tmp/1/
tar -cf ffmpeg-<version>.tar usr/
.. and don't put a slash before usr/ !
gzip ffmpeg-<version>.tar
# alian ffmpeg-<version>.tar.gz
.. creates a ' .deb ' package ...
.....

Mountain Man · 11-07-2009, 02:39 PM

Thanks to both of you. After thinking about this further, I think I would rather let synaptic install the repo version of ffmpeg for general use, and keep the built from source binary somewhere out of the path for just for converting the files from my camcorder. I'll probably create a batch file for the conversions so referencing the out of path version won't create a hassle.

Here is what I have done. Everything seems to work fine, so hopefully I haven't created a mess in my system. I found the installed from source binary of ffmpeg in /usr/local/bin, and moved the binary to an out of path folder. Then I installed ffmpeg via synaptic. This put the binary in /usr/bin/. For some reason at this point when I ran ffmpeg -version, it threw an error message: "bash: /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg: No such file or directory". I'm not sure why it did this, since both folders are in my PATH. To get around this I created a link in the /usr/local/bin folder to the version in /usr/bin.

This seems to work fine. Do you see any problems I might have created in doing this?