I haven’t blogged for a while now, guess I need a new redesigned template, which seems to boost my blogging ability. But here is a simple and short guide to build ffmpeg with the appropriate codecs to encode stuff for the PSP or iPod. These codecs aren’t enabled by default to legal (patent) issues.

You should have the medibuntu repository enabled for this to work.

Get some tools to build tje package along with the ffmpeg source in Ubuntu Intrepid. Then get the appropriate packages to build ffmpeg, and satisfy the evil codec dependencies:

apt-get install dpkg-dev devscripts
apt-get source ffmpeg
apt-get build-dep ffmpeg
apt-get install libmp3lame-dev libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev libx264-dev

To finished up, go into the sources directory, build the package with the external codecs and install everything after it finishes building the debian package. Note that the first command is optional, and is just to bump the package version so that is “newer” that the original repositories:

dch -i
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=externalcodecs dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc

dpkg -i *.deb

And that is it. Look for scripts that use ffmpeg to encode stuff for the PSP or iPod. There are plenty around. I’ll post my favourite at a later time.