How to Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 20.10 via Command Line

How to install FFmpeg on Ubuntu 20.10 and Ubuntu 20.04 via command line (terminal). Install and use FFmpeg on Ubuntu Linux systems.

FFmpeg

ffmpeg is a video and audio converter for Linux Ubuntu that can also grab from a live audio/video source. It can also convert between arbitrary sample rates and resize video on the fly with a high quality polyphase filter.

ffmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge.

It contains libavcodec, libavutil, libavformat, libavfilter, libavdevice, libswscale and libswresample which can be used by applications. As well as ffmpeg, ffplay and ffprobe which can be used by end users for transcoding and playing.

FFmpeg is a collection of libraries and tools to process multimedia content such as audio, video, subtitles and related metadata.

Libraries

libavcodec provides implementation of a wider range of codecs.
libavformat implements streaming protocols, container formats and basic I/O access.
libavutil includes hashers, decompressors and miscellaneous utility functions.
libavfilter provides a mean to alter decoded Audio and Video through chain of filters.
libavdevice provides an abstraction to access capture and playback devices.
libswresample implements audio mixing and resampling routines.
libswscale implements color conversion and scaling routines.

Tools

ffmpeg is a command line toolbox to manipulate, convert and stream multimedia content.
ffplay is a minimalistic multimedia player.
ffprobe is a simple analysis tool to inspect multimedia content.
Additional small tools such as aviocat, ismindex and qt-faststart.

Installing ffmpeg

Run the following commands in terminal to install FFmpeg in Ubuntu via PPA:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-4
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install ffmpeg

Once installed, run the command ffmpeg -version to check the version of the ffmpeg installed.

Using ffmpeg

Using ffmpeg is very easy. For example to convert a video file from mp4 to webm format:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.webm

And to convert an audio file from mp3 to ogg file:

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 output.ogg

For more help, you can visit the official FFmpeg Documentation page https://www.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html