The free ffmpeg video converter is a very powerful command-line tool for converting and down-sampling videos. However, the latest development version is not provided in binary form and building it with the necessary codecs can be rather challenging and frustrating. Because the tool is of great use value for me, I set myself a task to automate the compilation with a reasonable set of codecs. Using the build-ffmpeg as a starting point, I created a GNU Makefile which I maintain within jpgind source code snapshot. Now compiling and installing ffmpeg in Linux is as simple as follows.


curl -O -L http://kamedata.googlecode.com/files/jpgind.tar.bz2
tar jxf jpgind.tar.bz2
cd jpgind
make -f ffmpeg.mk
cp ffmpeg ~/bin


The binary ffmpeg is statically linked to the codecs. This works in Mac OS X as well (tested with 10.4.11) but you must install the GNU Make and the GNU Wget from the Fink project.