How to Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

In this article, we will have explained the necessary steps to install and configure FFmpeg on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Before continuing with this tutorial, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges. All the commands in this tutorial should be run as a non-root user.

FFmpeg is a source command line application for transcoding multimedia documents. It comprises a set of video libraries and shared audio like libavcodec, libavformat, and libavutil. Between different video and audio formats, sample prices that are placed and resize videos, you can convert with FFmpeg.

Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 18.04

Step 1. The first command will update the package lists to ensure you get the latest version and dependencies.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu.

To install the latest version of FFmpeg, you need to configure PPA on your system:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-3
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ffmpeg libav-tools x264 x265

Verify the installation by running the ffmpeg -version command which will print the FFmpeg version:

ffmpeg -version

The output should look something like this:

ffmpeg version 4.0.3-1~18.04.york0 Copyright (c) 2000-2018 the FFmpeg developers
built with gcc 7 (Ubuntu 7.3.0-27ubuntu1~18.04)

Step 3. FFmpeg Basic Commands.

Here is the list of the ffmepg basic command options used with ffmpeg command line tool:

ffmpeg -version:            show version
ffmpeg -formats:            show available formats
ffmpeg -codecs:             show available codecs
ffmpeg -decoders:           show available decoders
ffmpeg -encoders:           show available encoders
ffmpeg -bsfs:               show available bit stream filters
ffmpeg -protocols:          show available protocols
ffmpeg -filters:            show available filters
ffmpeg -pix_fmts:           show available pixel formats
ffmpeg -layouts:            show standard channel layouts
ffmpeg -sample_fmts:        show available audio sample formats

Congratulation, you have learned how to install and use FFmpeg on Ubuntu 18.04. If you have any question, please leave a comment below.