FFmpeg

To transcode your videos locally on your server, Blue Droplet Video uses FFmpeg. This is free software, like Drupal.

If you are using the transcoder at bluedroplet.com, then you do not require FFmpeg.

Installation

These instructions are specific to unix systems like Linux. It is recommend that Blue Droplet Video (and Drupal in general) be deployed on a unix system.

The important thing when installing FFmpeg is ensuring that it supports the codecs you require. The FFmpeg packaged with your distro may have poor codec support (e.g. Debian / Ubuntu's FFmpeg doesn't support mp3).

To ensure you have all the codecs you require we recommend you compile the latest version of FFmpeg.

You need subversion installed. Use your distro's package manager to install it. Then checkout FFmpeg from its repository:

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg

You then need to configure FFmpeg. Below is the configure command we recommend. However, it may detect that you do not have all the required libraries in place. In this case, either install them with your distro's package manager or remove them from the configure command. If you are using Fedora, you may wish to try RPM Fusion.

./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-static --enable-shared --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-pthreads --enable-libspeex --enable-libamr-nb --enable-libamr-wb --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libx264 --disable-ffserver --disable-ffplay --disable-debug --disable-network --enable-nonfree --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --disable-devices --disable-vhook

You then need to build FFmpeg and install it:

make
sudo make install

For H.264 encoding, you also need qt-faststart which is bundled with FFmpeg:

make tools/qt-faststart
sudo cp tools/qt-faststart /usr/bin/