Conan Build System

Conan is a multi-platform C/C++ package manager. While its typically used to help build applications, it does provide a nice way to build mutiple versions of applications that can easily be run side by side. For example, you can have multiple versions of ffmpeg installed, and you can switch between them by running the conanrun.bat script in a shell.

We have build profiles for MacOS, Linux and Windows.

OSX

cd EncodingGuidelines/conan
source linux-osx-setup.sh # sets up environment variables, installs conan and imports some additional conan recipes for vmaf, OCIO and and updated ffmpeg one to include the OCIO filter
source ffmpeg-8.1-osx-build.sh # Runs the conan build.

The resulting build should be in build-osx/full_deploy/host/ffmpeg/8.1/Release/armv8/bin/ffmpeg. It should be statically linked so that it can be run on other macs without conan installed.

If you do choose to use the dynamic build, you can create a standalone bundle that can be run on other macs without conan installed by running the following script:

cd EncodingGuidelines/conan
source ./create-osx-bundle.sh

Linux

If you are building for RHEL 9 / Rocky 9:

cd EncodingGuidelines/conan
source linux-osx-setup.sh # sets up environment variables, installs conan and imports some additional conan recipes for vmaf, OCIO and and updated ffmpeg one to include the OCIO filter
source ffmpeg-8.1-rhel9-build.sh # Runs the conan build.

The resulting build should be in build-rhel9/full_deploy/host/ffmpeg/8.1/Release/armv8/bin/ffmpeg. It should be statically linked so that it can be run on other macs without conan installed.

I think this should work on other varients of linux, but I haven’t tested it.

If you do choose to use the dynamic build, you can create a standalone bundle that can be run on other macs without conan installed by running the following script:

cd EncodingGuidelines/conan
source ./create-linux-bundle.sh

This will create an ffmpeg-linux-standalone folder from the build-rhel9/full_deploy output.

Windows

Windows is the more complex install since ffmpeg requires so many different libraries that require different build environments. What we have found that works is using the msys2 environment with the mingw toolchain.

Note, this build does not include x265, aom (AV1), or zimg (image scaling filter, an alternative to scale). Sadly there are unresolved issues building x265 and aom on Windows so they are currently disabled, although they will be built on linux and MacOS.

Start by downloading msys2, once its installed, you will be presented with a number of different launch environments. You want to use the one that has “mingw” in the name, e.g. “MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit”.

Its worth noting, that the this process works with x86_64, but not with arm64 (although that is something I’m hoping to eventually get working).

I would recommend checking out the Encoding Guidelines and then going to the conan folder.

There you can run windows_setup.sh to install the required tools and conan.

Once you have that running, you want to run:

cd EncodingGuidelines/conan
source windows-setup.sh

You can then run:

source windows_ffmpeg_build.sh

to build ffmpeg with conan, this will install ffmpeg in the conan/build-windows/full_deploy/host/ffmpeg/ folder. You can do an initial test of the code by running the build-windows/conanrun.bat script in a shell. This will set up the environment variables so that you can run the ffmpeg executables.