ffmpeg with AMR (.amr/.3gp) and x264 on Ubuntu

A few days ago I needed to convert some AMR audio files (recorded in a phone) to a more common format -- like mp3. I found out this would be difficult since:

• the ffmpeg from Ubuntu repositories does not suppport AMR
• ffmpeg dropped support of libamr as it used to have - now they use lib-opencore-amr

Fortunately I found a LOT of help in Ubuntu forums, thanks mc4man for that! I am going to summarize here what I did to finally decode amr files with ffmpeg. Here we will compile ffmpeg and x264 from source code, and install them as packages so we can remove them at any time later.

Following this how-to by FakeOutdoorsman, I downloaded x264 sources (why not? let's compile to support as many formats as possible), compiled it, and downloaded ffmpeg source code:

1. Make sure you don't have any of this installed from ubuntu:

sudo apt-get purge ffmpeg x264 libx264-dev

2. Download and compile x264: (You may need to install some build tools -- see the original how-to if you don't have them)

cd
git clone git://git.videolan.org/x264.git
cd x264
./configure
make
sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no --install=yes --pkgname=x264 --pkgversion "1:0.svn`date +%Y%m%d`-0.0ubuntu1" --default

3. Get libopencore-AMR-NB and libopencore-AMR-WB from DebianMultimedia. These are the urls for i386 and amd64. Download the four files libopencore-amr*, and install them with dpkg -i .

4. Download, configure and build ffmpeg. Note that the ./configure step is different than the one in the mentioned how-to -- it adds the flags for AMR.

cd
svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
cd ffmpeg
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-nonfree --enable-pthreads --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-version3
make
sudo checkinstall --fstrans=no --install=yes --pkgname=ffmpeg --pkgversion "3:0.svn`date +%Y%m%d`-12ubuntu3" --default

And it's done! I am now able to transcode my files to mp3:

ffmpeg -i test.amr -f avi -vcodec xvid -acodec libmp3lame -ar 22050 test.mp3

Now if later you want to remove these packages, remove ffmpeg, x264 and the four libopencore-amr* we have installed. And also, if you ever want to upgrade with a newer source code, see the original post; they instructions are there (I have not tested that yet).