How to install ffmpeg on a dedicated server

One of the many advantages of having your own server is the opportunity to create, convert and stream multimedia content much like the popular websites YouTube, Vimeo and Hulu, for example. No matter which tools or applications you decide to use, one that almost certainly will be required in all cases is FFmpeg - an open source collection of libraries and programs for handling and conversion of different multimedia formats. If you have cPanel or DirectAdmin installed on your server, you are running the popular Linux distribution CentOS. This tutorial gives you the steps to set up FFmpeg under CentOS.

As a starting point, please go ahead and start your favorite SSH client and log in to your server with the root password provided in your Welcome Email from ResellersPanel.com. Create a new text file with 'nano' (run "yum install nano" if the text editor is not installed at present):

Once you've opened the new file in 'nano', copy-paste the following:

Use Ctrl+O to save the file, click Enter/Return and you will exit 'nano'.
Secondly, you will need to install 'rpmforge'. In order to do this, please run the following:

As soon as the package is installed, feel free to execute the last command needed for the FFmpeg installation:

As dependencies, additional 60 applications and libraries will be installed for audio/video manipulation that will save you time and effort by preventing you from tracking all of them on your own, which will inevitably turn out to be a tedious exercise.

Once the installation is complete, you can verify that it went smoothly. Please type 'ffmpeg' in the command line interface, which should give you an output similar to this one, if ffmpeg is present:

FFmpeg version 0.5, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.