TheNitai

My favorite choice for running a Linux Server is CentOS, since it is based on the RedHat distribution you can rest assured you will get a top notch enterprise offering and stability. As with all things “enterprise” the priority is on stability and security and not on the latest code releases. This works 99% of the time, but sometimes you still need some update.

In the case of ImageMagick, CentOS comes with version 6.2.8, it was a bug that was fixed with PSD conversion and thus I needed to get the latest version installed. So, here are the steps to install ImageMagick 6.5.7 on CentOS 5.x. Mind you, that you will loose the internal patch upgrading from yum, but all you need to install to the next version is just to follow these steps again.

Uninstall current version
Uninstall the current version with:

yum erase ImageMagick*

This will uninstall ImageMagick 6.2.8 and if you have any other versions installed, like the devel one.

Install the needed dependencies
ImageMagick depends on a couple of additional libraries to convert to different formats. Let us just make sure, that they are all installed with:

yum install tcl-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel ghostscript-devel bzip2-devel freetype-devel libtiff-devel

Download and extract latest ImageMagick version
You can always get the latest ImageMagick version directly from their website. Code below will download and extract the file.

wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xcvf ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.5.7-5

Configure and make ImageMagick
With the below configure command we are configuring ImageMagick with the most needed options. Feel free to adjust it to your needs. As always issue a “–help” to see all the available options.

configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-bzlib=yes --with-fontconfig=yes --with-freetype=yes --with-gslib=yes --with-gvc=yes --with-jpeg=yes --with-jp2=yes --with-png=yes --with-tiff=yes

Wait until configure has finished. At the end you will see all the enable options. When you think all went well issue:

make

Now is a good time to make yourself some coffee or continue coding your next big killer application because make will take some time to finish. When it’s done, issue:

make install

That’s it! You are done. Wasn’t so bad, was it? Check with:

convert --version

That ImageMagick is properly installed and that you got the current version up and running. If all went well you should see something similar to this:

Version: ImageMagick 6.5.7-5 2009-11-08 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2009 ImageMagick Studio LLC

My primary Linux distribution of choice is CentOS. CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by RedHat. Thus CentOS is merely speaking a copy of RedHat and provides the same stability and security.

The trade off with stability and security is, that you mostly run packages which are not cutting edge and thus you run into issues where you need the cutting edge. This is the case with FFMpeg.

There is a DAG repository that give you FFMpeg in the yum installation, but that version is not working with libx264 or libfaac and still uses the older way of and might break some applications.

Thus I set out to find the best way to install FFMpeg. Since FFMpeg depends on a lot of external libraries we first have to install this external libraries.

Please follow the below steps one by one to install FFMpeg on CentOS/RedHat 5.x. successfully. Some of these libraries might be older (some even from 2008), thought I used what worked best for me and were stable in production environment.

Lets create a directory first
mkdir -p /opt/ffmpeg-packages
cd /opt/ffmpeg-packages

Installing FAAD2
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz
tar zxf faad2-2.6.1.tar.gz
cd faad2
autoreconf -vif
./configure –disable-drm –disable-mpeg4ip
make && make install

Installing FAAC
wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/faac/faac-1.26.tar.gz
tar zxfv faac-1.26.tar.gz
cd faac
./bootstrap
./configure –disable-mp4v2
make && make install

Installing LAME
wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lame/lame-3.98b8.tar.gz
tar zxfv lame-3.98b8.tar.gz
cd lame-3.98b8
./configure
make && make install

Installing yasm
wget http://www.tortall.net/projects/yasm/releases/yasm-0.7.0.tar.gz
tar zfvx yasm-0.7.0.tar.gz
cd yasm-0.7.0
./configure
make && make install

Installing x264

FFMpeg requires that you get the latest x264 codec. Thus we use the latest from their GIT repository.

git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
cd x264
./configure –enable-shared –prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install

Installing Xvid
wget http://downloads.xvid.org/downloads/xvidcore-1.2.1.tar.gz
tar zxfv xvidcore-1.2.1.tar.gz
cd xvidcore/build/generic
./configure
make && make install

Installing FFmpeg

For FFMPEG, you will need to get the latest out of SVN.

svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-nonfree –enable-postproc \
–enable-libfaad –enable-avfilter –enable-pthreads –enable-libxvid \
–enable-libx264 –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libfaac –disable-ffserver –disable-ffplay
make
make install

The “make” of FFmpeg can take up to 5 minutes, so please be patience. I also disable “FFServer” and “FFplay” on my servers. Please adjust to your environment.

Hope this helps.