Compiling ffmpeg with Raspberry Pi hardware acceleration

Compiling ffmpeg with Raspberry Pi hardware acceleration

  Thursday, August 03, 2017    DJ Maraz

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AFAIK the regular Debian/Raspbian version of ffmpeg does not support Raspberry Pi's hardware H.264 acceleration, so I decided to roll my own. Compiling also avoided some bloaty dependencies that the package in the Debian (Jessie backports) repository has.

It's a good idea to use checkinstall so that a proper deb package is created and installed. Raspbian should have git and compilation tools installed by default, but if not, install them. Then follow these steps:

Install checkinstall if you already haven't

sudo apt install checkinstall

Remove any other ffmpeg package

sudo apt remove ffmpeg

Get the ffmpeg source code and compile it (this will take loooong)

git clone https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg.git
cd FFmpeg
./configure --arch=armel --target-os=linux --enable-gpl --enable-omx --enable-omx-rpi --enable-nonfree --enable-mmal
make
(on Pi 2/3 you can utilize additional CPU cores with make -j4)

Install the self-compiled ffmpeg (fill in any information checkinstall wants)

sudo checkinstall

Lock the package so it won't get replaced by another version during software updates

echo "ffmpeg hold" | sudo dpkg --set-selections

Done!

You now have the latest and greatest ffmpeg installed and there's a precompiled deb package in your FFmpeg directory (you can delete the other stuff to free some space). Store that in a safe place, so you can quickly install it on another Pi (sudo dpkg -i ffmpeg*.deb) without recompiling.

If a future ffmpeg version offers something new that you need, you can simply repeat these steps to upgrade.

As ffmpeg is now installed like a regular Debian package, it's easy to uninstall: sudo apt remove ffmpeg

I'll be assuming this ffmpeg variant in my future Raspberry Pi projects and tutorials, so if you can't get them to work, switch to this self-compiled version.

Usage

To take advantage of Pi's accelerated H.264, use ffmpeg option -c:v h264_mmal for decoding and -c:v h264_omx for encoding. If you have a H.264 video file (inputfile.mp4) that needs to be re-encoded to a smaller bitrate (1500k), for example, you can take advantage of both:

ffmpeg -c:v h264_mmal -i inputfile.mp4 -c:v h264_omx -c:a copy -b:v 1500k outputfile.mp4