1. Go download Git from http://git-scm.com/download.  At the time of this posting, the latest version can be found at http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.1.tar.gz
2. SSH into your 1&1 account
3. “wget http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.1.tar.gz”, and that will download the package
4. “tar -xvzf git-1.6.1.tar.gz” which will decompress the gzip file into a subdirectory
5. “cd git*” to change into the subdirctory
6. “make” to begin compiling the source.  You won’t be able to do “make install” because you likely won’t have permission to install anything to the system.
7. Now Git is ready to rock with the exception of needing to add it to your $PATH.  This can be done by typing “echo ‘PATH=$PATH:~/git-1.6.1/’ > ~/.profile”

Done!

Before I get on with that, first I’ll describe the environment. We’re running on RHEL4 and have an install of FFMPEG that works fine (aside from that 1 user uploaded video). The last upgrade of FFMPEG to get h264 support wasn’t done by me, but rather our sysadmin, when we actually had a sysadmin. I believe he used rpms for the libraries and compiled FFMPEG from the SVN repo.

So I did a quick search just to remind myself what libraries I needed and I came across this post about compiling on RHEL4, our distro. Perfect. I followed directions to a T (aside from upgrading SVN) and it compiled fine. Now, time to run a test transcode…

[root@140859-www1 ~]# /home/derek/ffmpeg_sources/ffmpeg/ffmpeg -y -i /media/v2-prod/atlas/8102/20206 -ab 64k -ar 22050 -b 700K -r 15 -y -s 640×480 -ac 1 -padtop -padbottom -s vga /home/derek/blah.flv
FFmpeg version SVN-r13977, Copyright (c) 2000-2008 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libvorbis –enable-libfaac –enable-libfaad –enable-gpl –enable-libtheora –enable-libx264 –enable-shared
libavutil version: 49.7.0
libavcodec version: 51.57.2
libavformat version: 52.16.0
libavdevice version: 52.0.0
built on Jun 25 2008 14:49:55, gcc: 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-9)
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from ‘/media/v2-prod/atlas/8102/20206′:
Duration: 00:10:55.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 406 kb/s
Stream #0.0(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 44100 Hz, stereo
Stream #0.1(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 320×240 [PAR 0:1 DAR 0:1], 30.00 tb(r)
Output #0, flv, to ‘/home/derek/blah.flv’:
Stream #0.0(und): Video: flv, yuv420p, 640×480 [PAR 0:1 DAR 0:1], q=2-31, 700 kb/s, 15.00 tb(c)
Stream #0.1(und): Audio: libmp3lame, 22050 Hz, mono, 64 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
Stream #0.0 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding
/home/derek/ffmpeg_sources/ffmpeg/ffmpeg: symbol lookup error: /home/derek/ffmpeg_sources/ffmpeg/ffmpeg: undefined symbol: av_fifo_generic_write
You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/root

Well shit. Ok, so I hit up #ffmpeg again, but don’t get any help, so I try recompiling without any config options and it works fine. So I slowly start added on config options and it works until I add “–enable-share”, and which point it compiles a version of FFMPEG that throws the “undefined symbol” error. So that gives me a pretty good idea it has something to do with that. I go through the symlinks in the guide (linked above) and notice that /usr/lib/libavformat.so.50 is symlinked to a file that doesn’t exist. And that’s where I’m at now, kinda stumped. Am I missing libraries? how can I ensure any old libraries installed before are cleaned out and not conflicting with new ones? I’m a developer, not a linux admin. I know my way around the OS, but when it comes to this type of stuff, I’m stumped.

Any ideas? post a comment or email/gtalk me at drgath at gmail.com.