CoolLibs / easy_ffmpeg

Simplifies including the FFmpeg libraries. And adds wrappers for some common operations.

easy_ffmpeg

This wrapper around FFmpeg libraries makes it very easy to use them in your own project, cross-platform, and even shipping an executable to end users. You can either use it just to include the FFmpeg libraries, or you can also use our wrappers to simplify some common tasks like decoding a video.

Including

To add this library to your project, simply add these three lines to your CMakeLists.txt:

add_subdirectory(path/to/easy_ffmpeg)
target_link_libraries(${PROJECT_NAME} PRIVATE easy_ffmpeg::easy_ffmpeg)
ffmpeg_copy_libs(${PROJECT_NAME}) # This will make sure the shared libraries get installed next to the executable.

On Linux, you will also need to install the FFMPEG libraries with

sudo apt-get install libavcodec-dev libavdevice-dev libavfilter-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libpostproc-dev libswresample-dev libswscale-dev

On Mac, you will also need to install the FFMPEG libraries with

brew install ffmpeg

Then include it as:

#include <easy_ffmpeg/easy_ffmpeg.hpp>

Learning about FFmpeg

If you need to use the raw FFmpeg API, here are the few tutorials that we managed to find:

• Decent intro to the basics of FFmpeg
• More detailed tutorial (but a bit deprecated but it's okay)

Shipping an application

⚠ You need to be mindful of the LICENSE of FFmpeg. This wrapper provides a GPL version of FFmpeg on Windows, so you are not allowed to use it in a closed-source software (you can replace the libs in lib/FFmpeg/windows if you need to, and the LICENSE in lib/FFmpeg). There are also several other things to do to comply with their license, see https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html

NOTE: Since FFmpeg libs need to be linked dynamically:

• On Windows to ensure that end-users have the FFmpeg libs on their machine we copy them to the folder where your executable is created. If you send your executable to someone, you need to also share the libs. And if you create an installer, it will automatically include the libs so there is nothing to do in that case.
• On Linux and MacOS you need to tell your users to install FFMpeg manually, with sudo apt-get install ffmpeg on Linux and brew install ffmpeg on MacOS (+ install Homebrew if they don't have it already)

Running the tests

Simply use "tests/CMakeLists.txt" to generate a project, then run it.
If you are using VSCode and the CMake extension, this project already contains a .vscode/settings.json that will use the right CMakeLists.txt automatically.