FFmpeg Compilation Guide
This page contains a list of resources which describe the necessary steps required for compiling FFmpeg from scratch or with the help of build scripts and/or package managers.
All platforms
Read the Generic compilation guide, regardless of your platform. It provides generic compilation and installation instructions, including the use of configure
.
- CompilationGuide/vcpkg – vcpkg also aims to be portable accross all platforms. For windows it uses MinGW/MSYS compilation toolchain.
Linux
Alternative ways to obtain/compile ffmpeg under Linux:
- Docker image with pre-compiled ffmpeg and libraries
- Linuxbrew
macOS
Windows
- CompilationGuide/MinGW – MinGW Compilation Guide for compiling FFmpeg with Windows/MinGW/MSYS.
- CompilationGuide/CrossCompilingForWindows – Cross compiling for Windows is sometimes easier than using MSYS+MinGW.
- CompilationGuide/WinRT – Compiling FFmpeg for Windows Apps (Windows 10 and Windows 8.1)
- CompilationGuide/MSVC – Compiling FFmpeg using MSYS+MSVC, see also:
Using external scripts or tools:
- Media Autobuild Suite – Automatically build FFmpeg under Windows
- Linuxbrew, which can be used with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
- Chocolatey – a package manager for Windows with an FFmpeg package
Other Platforms
- How to compile FFmpeg for Raspberry Pi (Raspbian)
- Pre-compiled FFmpeg for Raspberry Pi (Raspbian) Docker image
- How to compile FFmpeg for Android
- How to cross-compile FFmpeg for MIPS
- How to compile FFmpeg for Haiku
Performance Tips
There are numerous avenues to extract maximum performance out of FFmpeg when it is built from source. The following list describes some of them:
- If using
GCC/Clang
, consider adding-march=native
to--extra-cflags
to make slightly better use of your hardware. Alternatively, for a more general solution, examine the--arch
and--cpu
options. Gains are variable, and usually quite small. However, this is usually even more safe than the above, and is thus listed here.
- Depending on your use case,
--enable-hardcoded-tables
may be a useful option. It results in an increase of approximately 15% in the size oflibavcodec
, the main library impacted by this change. It enables savings in table generation time, done once at codec initialization, since by hardcoding the tables, they do not need to be computed at runtime. However, the savings are often negligible (~100k cycles is a typical number) especially when amortized over the entire encoding/decoding operation. By default, this is not enabled. Improvements are being made to the runtime initialization, and so over time, this option will have an impact on fewer and fewer codecs.
- Other options may be found by examining
./configure --help
.
Guides for developers
Last modified
4 years ago
Last modified on Nov 22, 2020, 5:32:21 PM
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