FFmpeg distribution status

FFmpeg distribution packages are often incomplete or crippled. Oftentimes they are not crippled, but people claim they are. This page tries to track the status of FFmpeg in distributions to clear up this confusion and provide a quick overview of the situation.

Gentoo (unverified)

Gentoo packages are not crippled in any way.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu ships two variants of FFmpeg packages, from which both are uncrippled. The variant in the "multiverse" section has been built against the additional (optional) packages x264, mp3lame and xvidcore, which enables the respective additional encoders.

FFmpeg is not available on the install DVDs.

Ubuntu after (including) 9.10 (karmic) ship FFmpeg 0.5, after 9.04 (maverick) FFmpeg 0.6.

Debian

The packages in Debian Squeeze are uncrippled. Packages in Debian Lenny packages are based on a snapshot from February 2008 and have the following some encoders disabled:

• h263
• mpeg2video
• mpeg4
• msmpeg4 (and variants)

Note that even Debian Squeeze does not ship the packages x264, xvidcore or mp3lame, which means that these packages cannot be used for encoding to h264 or MP3.

Fedora / Red Hat (unverified)

Fedora does not have any sort of multimedia in their repositories, except for the Xiph kind. FFmpeg and other packages are available from the livna repositories.

OpenSUSE (unverified)

The status regarding OpenSUSE is unknown. Supposedly they ship no FFmpeg packages, users need to get them from packman instead.