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A lot of people are getting hiring people to install FFMPEG as they think it’s a difficult task, but it’s much easier than you think if you follow these instructions. You should have root access & basic Linux knowledge to the server to follow these instructions.

1. Create a directory to do our work in
mkdir ~/ffmpeg
cd ~/ffmpeg

2. Get all the source files
wget http://www3.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/ essential-20061022.tar.bz2
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/9225/ flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
wget http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ lame/lame-3.97.tar.gz
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ ffmpeg-php/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ ogg/libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
wget http://downloads.xiph.org/releases/ vorbis/libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz

3. Extract all the source files
bunzip2 essential-20061022.tar.bz2; tar xvf essential-20061022.tar
tar zxvf flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6.tgz
tar zxvf lame-3.97.tar.gz
bunzip2 ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tbz2; tar xvf ffmpeg-php-0.5.0.tar
tar zxvf libogg-1.1.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf libvorbis-1.1.2.tar.gz

4. Create the codecs directory & import them
mkdir /usr/local/lib/codecs/
mv essential-20061022/* /usr/local/lib/codecs/
chmod -R 755 /usr/local/lib/codecs/

5. Install SVN/Ruby (Depends on OS, this is for RHEL/CentOS)
yum install subversion
yum install ruby
yum install ncurses-devel

6. Get the latest FFMPEG/MPlayer from the subversion
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer

7. Compile LAME
cd ~/ffmpeg/lame-3.97
./configure
make
make install

8. Compile libOGG
cd ~/ffmpeg/libogg-1.1.3
./configure
make
make install

9. Compile libVorbis
cd ~/ffmpeg/libvorbis-1.1.2
./configure
make
make install

10. Compile flvtool2
cd ~/ffmpeg/flvtool2_1.0.5_rc6
ruby setup.rb config
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

11. Compile MPlayer
cd ~/ffmpeg/mplayer
./configure
make
make install

12. Compile FFMPEG
cd ~/ffmpeg/ffmpeg
./configure --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libogg --enable-libvorbis --disable-mmx --enable-shared
echo '#define HAVE_LRINTF 1' >> config.h
make
make install

13. Finalize the codec setups
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.50 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.50
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavcodec.so.51 /usr/lib/libavcodec.so.51
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavutil.so.49 /usr/lib/libavutil.so.49
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0
ln -s /usr/local/lib/libavformat.so.51 /usr/lib/libavformat.so.51

14. Compile FFMPEG-PHP
cd ~/ffmpeg/ ffmpeg-php-0.5.0
phpize
./configure
make
make install

15. Install FFMPEG-PHP (make sure the php.ini path is correct.)
echo 'extension=/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/ no-debug-non-zts-20020429/ffmpeg.so' >> /usr/local/Zend/etc/php.ini

16. Restart Apache to load FFMPEG-PHP (Depends on OS, this is for RHEL/CentOS)
service httpd restart

17. Verify if it works
php -r 'phpinfo();' | grep ffmpeg

If you get a few lines such as
ffmpeg
ffmpeg support (ffmpeg-php) => enabled
ffmpeg-php version => 0.5.0
ffmpeg.allow_persistent => 0 => 0

Then everything is installed and working. FFMPEG, FFMPEG-PHP, MPlayer, MEncoder, flv2tool, LAME MP3 encoder & libOGG.

While working on a few of my clients pages, I’ve always used other methods for CSS hacks but mostly using PHP to detect the remote user User-Agent and come up with the specific CSS. Until I’ve discovered this one:

You can actually have IE6 specific lines in CSS, it’s as simple as prefixing them with an underscore. Sure, you might start complaining “STANDARDS!!11!” – If I had to choose from a site that works fine in every browser and standards, I’ll go with the more working one. That’s not all! You can actually have lines that are both IE6 & IE7 specific in CSS by prefixing them with a dot.

So to sum it up, let’s say if I use a left margin that has to be 5px in Firefox/Opera, 6px for IE6 & 7px for IE7 – Here’s how I would do it:

margin-left: 5px; /* Left margin for all browsers, mainly Opera, Firefox, etc. */
.margin-left: 7px; /* Left margin of 7px that can be readable by both IE6 & IE7, now other still think it’s 5 while IE6 & IE7 think it’s 7 */
_margin-left: 6px; /* Only IE6 reads this and changes the value to 6px */

I have to admit I was pretty happy upon discovering this hack; I’ll sure be using it for a while now that I have found a pretty good one.

Do you have any of your own do not need loads of JavaScript and/or PHP code to work? Comment on!