Anyone who has spent time with FFmpeg and its plethora of compile flags and dependencies I’m sure would tell you “its a real pain in the ass!”.

Although its not available through the default yum libraries you can save yourself a huge amount of time by using the FFmpeg install available through the DAG repository.

First you will need to add DAG to your YUM repo by adding the latest RPM Forge release if you do not already have it on your system, I like to use the RHEL RPM:

rpm -Uhv http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Now all you will need to do to get FFmpeg running is one line through shell:

yum install ffmpeg

To test your install type:

ffmpeg --help

If you need to access the binary from a script, it should be located in /usr/bin/ffmpeg by default.