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.

Generating PDF’s is an easy method to make a very nice printable and/or savable version of an article. This could be helpful in a WordPress blog or any articles website. This method utilizes the popular FPDF class.

First of all, I suggest you get the latest FPDF version from here. I suggest creating a directory such as “pdf” on your web hosting space. You will need to place the fpdf.php into that directory, you will only need it.

Let’s make our first “Hello World” example. Place the following in a file called test.php:

<?php
require('fpdf.php');
$pdf=new FPDF();
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
$pdf->Output();
?>

Now let’s see that code line by line…

require('fpdf.php');
This line includes our FPDF class that we need to create the PDF file.

$pdf=new FPDF();
This line creates a new instance of the FPDF class which will be binded to $pdf

$pdf->AddPage();
This line tells FPDF to add a new page to the PDF file; obviously we need one page so we will call this function once.

$pdf->SetFont('Arial','B',16);
This line tells the FPDF class to change the font to Arial, bold, 16 pt.

$pdf->Cell(40,10,'Hello World!');
This line is just like the “echo” of PHP, the text fields in PDF files are just sort of rectangles with text in them, so we want the width of 40 pt. and a height of 10 pt., the third value is the text to be written in that rectangular box.

$pdf->Output();
Our final line, which pretty much means: “we’re done, show us our PDF!”

That’s a very simple FPDF usage, however, here is a bit of more advanced version of FPDF usage:

<?php
require('fpdf.php');
$pdf=new FPDF("L", "mm", "A4");
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->SetFont('Arial','BIU',30);
$pdf->SetTextColor(0,0,255);
$pdf->Cell(60,20,'PDF+PHP Test',1,1,C,0);
$pdf->Output();
?>

Now let’s do a quick review of that more advanced code:

$pdf=new FPDF("L", "mm", "A4");
This will create a new instance but instead will default to creating landscape pages because of the first L, P can be used instead to default to portrait pages. The second value is the default measurement unit, a choice of point (pt), millimeter (mm), centimeter (cm) and inch (in) is given. The last value is the size of the page, the choice of A3, A4, A5, Letter & Legal is given.

$pdf->AddPage();
Simple function, just add the page, you can tell the function to create either a portrait (P) or landscape (L) by giving it as a first value (ex: $pdf->AddPage("L"), $pdf->AddPage("P")).

$pdf->SetFont('Arial','BIU',38);
This required function again says that we want an Arial, 30 mm in size (because of the default size unit), the 'BIU' simply tells that we want it to be Bold, Italic & Underlined.

$pdf->SetTextColor(0,0,255);
This sets the default text color for the text we will be writing, I’ve chosen blue here, the first value is red (r), the second is green (g) & blue (b).

$pdf->Cell(60,20,'PDF+PHP Test',0,1,C,0);
This makes the so famous rectangle with 60 mm of width & 20 mm of height, we wrote ‘PDF+PHP Test’ and the first 0 means we do not want a border. The 1 next to it means that once it’s done the cell, it will go to the beginning of the next line, if 0 is provided, then it will be to the right of it, if 2 is provided then it will go below. The C is just the alignment which is center of the text inside the box, possible values are left (L), center (C), right (R).

$pdf->Output();
Output our brand new colorful PDF file!

Thanks for reading!