FFmpeg on Mac OS X How-to | Hacker News Reader

FFmpeg on Mac OS X How-to

stephenjungels.com

12 pointsgarret9 comments

I had some problems when compiling faac/faad on my machine (Macbook Pro, Leopard, Xcode 3.1). Could just be my luck, but here's what was wrong / the fixes incase it happened to someone else.

On faac, I had errors like

  ../libtool: line 792: X--tag=CC: command not found 
  ../libtool: line 792: X--mode=compile: command not found"

After googling around, turns out it was a problem with ltmain.sh - which ./bootstrap creates. It checks to see if the OS is Darwin, and then runs glibtoolize instead of libtoolize (Apple includes glibtoolize it seems, its in my /usr/bin). However glibtoolize isn't generating the correct file for some reason. Not sure why this is. I've got autoconf/automake/libtool installed from a past project so I used those instead of figuring out exactly what was wrong.

To get FAAC to compile, I ran "aclocal -I .; autoheader; libtoolize --automake; automake --add-missing; autoconf" manually instead. This one worked properly and was able to install.

FAAD was had more wrong then just glibtoolize generating a wrong file. It would generate a configure file, however it wasn't complete. The README here didn't help install for OS X, and the only INSTALL file i could find was for the xmms plugin. So I read the *nix README. Which said to run autoreconf -vif first. That brought up:

  /usr/local/share/automake-1.10/am/depend2.am: am__fastdepCXX does not appear in AM_CONDITIONAL
  /usr/local/share/automake-1.10/am/depend2.am:   The usual way to define `am__fastdepCXX' is to add `AC_PROG_CXX'
  /usr/local/share/automake-1.10/am/depend2.am:   to `configure.in' and run `aclocal' and `autoconf' again.

To fix this, open up configure.in and find the only mention of AC_PROG_CXX. Change that line from "dnl AC_PROG_CXX" to just "AC_PROG_CXX" Then rerun "aclocal -I .; autoheader; libtoolize --automake; automake --add-missing; autoconf" instead of relying on ./boostrap. Then it compiled correctly for me.

If anyone wants, I could just toss together a quick .pkg that would install faac 1.26 and faad 2.61. lame (3.98) and ffmpeg's (latest svn, 14469) installs were straightforward enough and didn't have issues so those shouldn't need a pkg. Though ffmpeg was missing a ton of libraries. Suppose thats what I get (along with fixing problems like the one above) for not using fink or macports.

If people are looking for a simple way to convert audio and video on Mac OS X, I suggest looking into AudialHub and VisualHub by Techspansion (http://www.techspansion.com/)

Though it's not free, I've been very impressed with the quality of the video conversions I've done and the simplicity of the user interface.

(note: this is not my software, I'm just a fan)

IIRC, VisualHub uses ffmpeg for a number of video formats when converting.

You're right, that's one of the reasons why I posted. If you're looking for the power and quality of ffmpeg but are intimidated by the interface (let's face it, you are on a Mac for a reason ;) ) chances are you'll like VisualHub. One added bonus I'm enjoying is the ability to distribute the processing via XGrid.

Our app uses ffmpeg. It was a total pain in the arse getting it to build on Mac/Win/Linux w/ h.264. I have scripts that build it on each platform. If anyone needs them email me.

Is building libx264 really that difficult? As one of the developers I like to take pride in the fact that we have so many fewer dependencies than nearly everything I else I have to compile these days; we require yasm or nasm, and that's about it. Not to mention that it makes development a lot easier...

The biggest issues I've seen people have are mostly because their distribution includes a really old x264 which they didn't update, or because they're mixing apps compiled with PIC with those compiled without.

The former issue, fortunately, was resolved by getting ffmpeg to include an option for our most powerful motion search mode--which was added only about 6 months ago. This meant ffmpeg wouldn't build unless you updated x264, which forced everyone to start actually using builds from this century ;)

Looking at my script for building ffmpeg w/ x264 on osx, x264 is not the problem. Here is the ffmpeg configure line:

./configure --disable-vhook --disable-mmx --enable-pthreads --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --extra-ldflags="-l m"

Getting all these configure options right was a real PITA. The ffmpeg mailing list is a very hostile environment and I found most of it from random googling.

My configure line for x264 was: ./configure

So yes, you guys are all good.

BTW it is a really great library. You should be proud.

I hate How-tos like this that resort to fink or Macports.

this is brilliant, I just tried using macports, which didn't work, after a quick break I found this link, now hopefully this works.

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