Installing avconv from source in Ubuntu

This is pretty interesting as avconv is a pretty sensitive fellow. If you do this wrongly, your avconv is pretty much not workable no matter how you are going to spin this. Hence, i do myself a favour and write this up instead. Now, before i began, let me explain what version of Ubuntu i am using. I am on Ubuntu 12.04.5 LTS and if i do the following from repo

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libav-tools

I will be getting myself avcon version 8.x.x since i am on a older version of Ubuntu. Hence, the installed of avcon from source.

Removing older avconv or ffmpeg

Before we do anything at all, we need to remove the older version of avcon.

apt-get remove --purge libav-tools

and this will remove the built in avconv that you might have installed

Installing prerequisite files

Now, fire the below command to install everything you may need for your avconv compilation

apt-get install build-essential
apt-get install yasm
apt-get install libfdk-aac-dev
apt-get install libx264-dev

Once you have done that, we are good to go!

Installing avconv from source

I am going to install avconv version 11 from libav.org.

wget https://libav.org/releases/libav-11.6.tar.gz  --no-check-certificate
tar zxvf libav-11.6.tar.gz
cd libav-11.6/
./configure --enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-version3 --enable-libx264 --enable-static --disable-shared
make && make install

After you have finished compilation (which takes some time), you are pretty much installed with the newer version of avconv! Not that tough right?