Installing FFMpeg in Linux (Debian and Ubuntu)

So this was surprisingly easy. I had tried to do this a few months back (a method that involved building from source *weeping*  *sobbing hysterically*)

The FFMpeg guys (God bless their souls) have an excellent guide on their website.

For Debian:

The instructions are here:

Basically follow these steps:

1. check your debian version ( cat /etc/debian_version)

2. Depending on your debian version ( squeeze = Debian 6, wheezy = Debian 7, jessie = Debian 8), add one of the sources  given in this link to your /etc/apt/sources.list file.

3. As at the time of writing this, the maintainer of the repository had some issues with his GPG key, so as instructed by him, run the following first

wget http://www.deb-multimedia.org/pool/main/d/deb-multimedia-keyring/deb-multimedia-keyring_2015.6.1_all.deb

and

sudo dpkg -i deb-multimedia-keyring_2015.6.1_all.deb

Then

sudo apt-get update

and finally

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

With this all done you can now run (with peace of mind):

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

And that's it, you're good to go.

NOTE: This was pretty straightforward(maybe too easy even), I am still observing to see if any issues come up.

For Ubuntu:

Basically add the Ubuntu Multimedia PPA like so:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/trusty-media

Then update and upgrade like so:

sudo apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

And finally like before:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

And that's all.
God bless the FFMpeg guys for some detailed instructions!