Installing ffmpeg on raspberry pi with .h264 support

The raspberry pi is great for recording video. One issue however is that the .h264 container it records in is hard to work with. It is therefore often desirable to convert videos to widely applicable formats like .mp4 to be able to view them properly and get the right meta information. For this I recommend the program FFmpeg.

The pirecorder package also comes with a special Convert class with a number of helpful functionalities to make it very easy to convert videos, folders of videos as well as images to video. See the guide here.

Installing FFmpeg on a Raspberry Pi is not as simple as downloading an executable from the command line, but it is also not too difficult. Follow these steps:

Table of contents

1. Install h264 library
2. Install ffmpeg with h264
3. Convert (h264) video

Install h264 library

Open a terminal window on the raspberrypi (or via SSH connection) and type in the following commands:

• Download h264 library:

  git clone --depth 1 https://code.videolan.org/videolan/x264
  

• Change directory to the x264 folder:

  cd x264
  

• Configure installation:

  ./configure --host=arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi --enable-static --disable-opencl
  

• Create the installation:

  make -j4
  

• Install h264 library on your system:

  sudo make install
  

Install ffmpeg with h264

• Change to home directory:

  cd ~
  

• Download ffmpeg:

  git clone git://source.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg --depth=1
  

• Change to ffmpeg directory:

  cd ffmpeg
  

• Configure installation:

  ./configure --extra-ldflags="-latomic" --arch=armel --target-os=linux --enable-gpl --enable-omx --enable-omx-rpi --enable-libx264 --enable-nonfree
  

• Make the installation:

  make -j4
  

  Note this step may take a long time!

• Now finally run the installation:

  sudo make install
  

There are many options available and many other ways to convert h264 videos with ffmpeg, but this command is the quickest of all methods that I tested.

Note: If you are working with an older model of the raspberrypi (< 3 B+) then you may not have 4 cores available. You will then have to change make -j4 to make -j.

Convert (h264) video

Now you are ready to convert (h264) videos on your Raspberry Pi. To convert a single video with ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i USER_VIDEO.h264 -vcodec copy USER_VIDEO.mp4

The Convert class of the pirecorder package builds on ffmpeg and added a number of functionalities to make it easier to help you convert your media, especially as recorded with pirecorder. Read its documentation here. For example, to convert a folder of videos, add frame numbers to the topleft corner of each video frame, and resize the video by half:

convert --indir VIDEOS --outdir CONVERTED --withframe True --resizeval 0.5