Compiling on Mac OS X is as easy as any other *nix machine, there are just a few caveats. The general procedure is ./configure <flags>; make && sudo make install, but some use a different configuration scheme, or none at all.
You can also install the latest stable version of FFmpeg without the need to compile it yourself, which saves you a bit of time. Just follow this guide.
Prerequisites and Dependencies
XCode
Starting with Lion 10.7, Xcode is available for free from the Mac App Store and is required to compile anything on your Mac. Make sure you install the Command Line Tools from Preferences > Downloads > Components. Older versions are still available with an AppleID and free Developer account at developer.apple.com.
Homebrew
To get FFmpeg for OS X, you first have to install Homebrew.
ruby <(curl -fsSkL raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)
At this point, you could already run brew install ffmpeg to get the latest stable version. This version is packaged as a Homebrew Formula and will take care of all the dependencies and installation. Run brew info ffmpeg to see additional configuration options. If instead you want to manually compile the latest Git version of FFmpeg, continue with this guide.
Remaining Dependencies
First, we need to install a few dependencies.
brew install automake celt faac fdk-aac git lame libass libtool libvorbis libvpx \ libvo-aacenc opencore-amr openjpeg opus sdl schroedinger shtool speex texi2html \ theora wget x264 xvid yasm
Install libaacplus (at the moment, there is no Homebrew formula for it):
wget http://217.20.164.161/~tipok/aacplus/libaacplus-2.0.2.tar.gz tar xzf libaacplus-2.0.2.tar.gz cd libaacplus-2.0.2 # libtool on osx is quite different from the gnu libtool, which is called glibtool on osx sed -i '.bck' -e 's/libtool/glibtool/' autogen.sh ./autogen.sh make && make install cd ..
The new version of autoconf requires that you replace AM_CONFIG_HEADER in configure.ac at line 8 with AC_CONFIG_HEADERS. If you don't make this change you will see the following error message in the terminal:
configure.ac:8: error: 'AM_CONFIG_HEADER': this macro is obsolete. You should use the 'AC_CONFIG_HEADERS' macro instead.
Mac OS X Lion comes with Freetype already installed (older versions may need 'X11' selected during installation), but in an atypical location: /usr/X11. Running freetype-config in Terminal can give the locations of the individual folders, like headers, and libraries, so be prepared to add lines like CFLAGS=`freetype-config --cflags` LDFLAGS=`freetype-config --libs` PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$PKG_CONFIG_PATH:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/X11/lib/pkgconfig before./configure or add them to your $HOME/.profile file.
Compile FFmpeg
Once you have compiled all of the codecs/libraries you want, you can now download the FFmpeg source either with Git or the from release tarball links on the website. Study the output of ./configure --help and make sure you've enabled all the features you want, remembering that --enable-nonfree and --enable-gpl will be necessary for some of the dependencies above. A sample command is:
git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.git ffmpeg cd ffmpeg ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --enable-postproc --enable-libaacplus \ --enable-libass --enable-libcelt --enable-libfaac --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libfreetype --enable-libmp3lame \ --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-openssl \ --enable-libopus --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvo-aacenc \ --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --prefix=/usr/local make && make install
Finally install qt-faststart. This is a useful tool if you're showing your H.264 MP4 videos on the web. It relocates the MOOV atom in the video to allow playback to begin before the file is completely downloaded. When converting files with ffmpeg you can use -movflags faststart to have the same effect.
make tools/qt-faststart
You can use it like this:
qt-faststart input.mp4 output.mp4
Manual install of the dependencies without Homebrew
Pkg-config & GLib
Pkg-config is necessary for detecting some of the libraries you can compile into FFmpeg, and it requires GLib which is not included in Mac OS X (but almost every other *nix distribution). You may either download pkg-config 0.23, or download the large tarball from Gnome.org and compile it. Pkg-config is available from Freedesktop.org.
To compile GLib, you must also download gettext from GNU.org and edit the file stpncpy.c to add "#undef stpncpy" just before "#ifndef weak_alias". Lion has its own (incompatible) version of the stpncpy function, which overlaps in gettext. Compile gettext as usual. Compile GLib with LIBFFI_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include/ffi LIBFFI_LIBS=-lffi ./configure;make && sudo make install
To compile pkg-config, run GLIB_CFLAGS="-I/usr/local/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/local/lib/glib-2.0/include" GLIB_LIBS="-lglib-2.0 -lgio-2.0" ./configure --with-pc-path="/usr/X11/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/X11/share/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig"
Yasm
Yasm is available from tortall.net and is necessary for compiling C code that contains machine-independent Assembler code. To compile, run ./configure --enable-python; make && sudo make install
Additional libraries
These are just some examples. Run .configure --help for all available options.
- FAAC (AAC) is available at audiocoding.com. Enabling support in ffmpeg requires the --enable-libfaac --enable-nonfree configure options.
- Lame (MP3) is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/lame/files/lame/, and adds MP3 encoding to FFmpeg. Enabling support in ffmpeg requires --enable-libmp3lame.
- Libass (Subtitle) is available at http://code.google.com/p/libass/. In order to compile with --enable-libass you need Freetype installed.
- OpenJPEG (Jpeg 2000) is available at http://code.google.com/p/openjpeg/downloads/list . Compile with --enable-libopenjpeg.
- Schroedinger, which adds Dirac codec support, is available from diracvideo.org. To compile schroedinger, you need ORC, available from entropywave.com. Compile orc with the standard procedure, making sure you delete the "testsuite" folder, which won't compile. When compiling schroedinger, make sure pkg-config and yasm are already installed.
- Speex is available at xiph.org. Compile with --enable-libspeex.
- Theora, Ogg and Vorbis are available at theora.org. Compile with --enable-libtheora.
- VPX is available at http://code.google.com/p/webm/downloads/list. Compile with --enable-libvpx.
- x264 is available at http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html. FFmpeg depends on x264 when compiled with --enable-libx264 and x264 depends on FFmpeg when compiled with --enable-lavf-input. The best way to handle it is to install x264 first without --enable-lavf-input, then compile FFmpeg with --enable-libx264 and finally compile x264 again with --enable-lavf-input.
- XviD is available from xvid.org. Compile with --enable-libxvid.