Ffmpeg, in addition to being a powerful multimedia application set, is a ubiquitous backend for video and audio applications across all platforms. Even if your application of choice doesn't use ffmpeg directly, it will likely be useful for conversion and compression.

If you are doing multimedia on Linux, ffmpeg is possibly the most important dependencies to install. Since ffmpeg is a big application with innumerable options, it's best to maintain control over whether these options are enabled or disabled. It is not included in any Slackermedia queue file because the default build script available on Slackbuilds.org is insufficient. You should instead either compile ffmpeg yourself or use Slackermedia's build:

Building ffmpeg with all of its options activated can take a lot of time and involve a lot of hunting for some pretty obscure codec libraries. You are welcome to download the installable ffmpeg and ffmpeg-related packages from the Slackermedia website at http://slackermedia.info/slackbuilds.

To learn about the compiling options, read the ffmpeg compiling documentation found in the source code tarball, and then try ./configure –help

Since a SlackBuild is just a shell script, you can specify variables from the command line that will be passed to the SlackBuild script, although this tends to be just as complex as editing the SlackBuild script itself. The results are the same, so use whatever method is most comfortable for you:

./ffmpeg.SlackBuild