Building FFMPEG on Mac OSX Snow Leopard

FFMPEG is an amazing set of video and audio conversion tools, accessible via the command-line. It's rather fiddly to use, but being a command-line program it can be easily integrated into your server-side tools. The sequence of steps below worked perfectly for me on Snow Leopard with XCode 3.2.4 installed.

cd ~
# checkout the latest version of the source
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg

# enable mp3 support (you need to install lame first. omit --enable-libmp3lame to build without it)
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-shared  --disable-mmx --arch=x86_64

# compile
make

# install
sudo make install

Example Commands

Here are some of the commands I've run so far..

Rotate a video 90 degrees clockwise (good for films shot in portrait

ffmpeg -vf "transpose=1" -i input.mp4 output.mp4

Note that there are many tutorials on the web that suggest you should use --vfilter "rotate=90" to rotate a video. This no longer works, as vfilters has been renamed vf, and the rotate option has been removed. As of Dec 2010, the above command does work.

Convert a mp3 to a flv audio file

ffmpeg -y -i myfile.mp3 -f flv -acodec libmp3lame -ab 64 -ac 1 myfile.flv

I'm using this command as part of a project I'm working on, flv is better than mp3 as you can stream (using flowplayer) an flv in such a way that user can jump around to any point of the audio without needing to download it all to that point. However, this is quite fiddly, a future blog post will explain how I did this!