How to install and use FFmpeg on RHEL 8 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) Linux Operating System

Install FFmpeg in Red Hat 8 Linux

The FFmpeg is the most potent and useful command-line tool on Linux system for multimedia files transcoding. You can use FFmpeg to convert multimedia files between various video and audio formats and resize videos. It has multiple audio and video libraries such as libavcode, libavformat, and libavutil.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to install FFmpeg into RHEL 8 Linux operating system. Here we will also show you how to install FFmpeg stable and latest version into various Red Hat Linux distro.

The same instruction you can use any other RHEL-based Linux distribution Operating Systems.

Prerequisites

  1. A RHEL 8 Linux installed system or Server.
  2. A non-root user with sudo privileges to add and configure the repository and install the package.

Install FFmpeg on RHEL 8 Linux OS

The FFmpeg package comes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux default repository so you can install it by using an apt package manager and this is also a most comfortable way to install FFmpeg on RHEL 8 operating system.

Follow below process to install FFmpeg on RHEL 8 Linux:

Step 01. First, update the package into the system using the following command:
$ sudo yum install epel-release -y
$ sudo yum update -y

Step 02: Install the Nux Dextop YUM repo

Currently, Official RPM package is not available for FFmpeg in Red Hat Linux. So, to install FFmpeg packages in RHEL, need to use third pary yum repo called Nux Dexktop.

Use following command to add Nux Desktop repository in your RHEL 8 Operating System.

$ sudo rpm --import http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/RPM-GPG-KEY-nux.ro
$ sudo rpm -Uvh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el7/x86_64/nux-dextop-release-0-2.el6.nux.noarch.rpm

Step 03: Now, you can install FFmpeg by using the following command:

$ sudo yum install ffmpeg

Step 03: After installation of FFmpeg, you can validate it by checking the version of FFmpeg as shown below:

$ ffmpeg –version

You can also check available FFmpeg’s all encoders and decoders by using the following command:

$ ffmpeg –encoders
$ ffmpeg –decoders

Now, FFmpeg successfully installed into your RHEL 8 System or server.

Use of FFmpeg

Here we will explain some of the primary examples of FFmpeg uses.

Basic Conversion

The good thing with FFmpeg is when you are going to convert of video or audio file from one format to another you no need to specify input or output format, It will automatically detect input file format, and for the output format, it will take from the file name extension. 
 
Example 1 – Convert a video file from mp4 to webm:
$ ffmpeg –I input.mp4 output.webm

Example 2 – Convert an audio file from mp3 to ogg:

$ ffmpeg –I input.mp3 output.ogg

Specifying codecs

You can specify the codecs at the time of file conversion using FFmpeg using –c option. It can be the name of supported encoder/decoder or a unique value copy which simply copies the input stream. 
 
Example 1 – you can convert a video file from mp4 format to webm using video codec “libvpx” and audio codec “libvorbis” using following command:
$ ffmpeg –I input.mp4 –c:v libvpx –c:a libvorbis output.webm

Example 2 – You can convert an audio file from mp3 format to ogg encoded with the codec “libopus”.

$ ffmpeg –I input.mp3 –c:a libopus output.ogg

Conclusion

Now, you are ready to install FFmpeg on RHEL 8 and any other RHEL-based Linux distribution. You can also visit the FFmpeg official documentation page and learn more about FFmpeg uses.

If you have any doubt, problem in installation or having feedback, feel free to leave comment.

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