Recently, I needed to use ffmpeg to stabilize some videos made with my iPhone, and the damned utility was giving me grief about missing VidStab support.
The process is a bit hairy, and ChatGPT initially sent me a wild goose chase, but eventually, I got things working on my WSL2 Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS. Here’s how:
# Remove stock ffmpeg apt-get remove ffmpeg # Install some pre-requisites add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-4 apt-get update apt-get install -y autoconf automake build-essential cmake git libaom-dev libass-dev libfdk-aac-dev libfreetype6-dev libmp3lame-dev libnuma-dev libopus-dev libsdl2-dev libtool libunistring-dev libva-dev libvdpau-dev libvorbis-dev libvpx-dev libx264-dev libx265-dev libxcb1-dev libxcb-shm0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev nasm pkg-config texinfo wget yasm zlib1g-dev libfontconfig1-dev mkdir ~/ffmpeg_sources cd ~/ffmpeg_sources git clone https://github.com/georgmartius/vid.stab.git cd vid.stab cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local make make install cd ~/ffmpeg_sources git clone https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg ffmpeg cd ffmpeg ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --pkg-config-flags="--static" --extra-cflags="-I/usr/local/include" --extra-ldflags="-L/usr/local/lib" --extra-libs="-lpthread -lm" --bindir="/usr/local/bin" --enable-gpl --enable-libass --enable-libfdk-aac --enable-libfreetype --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libopus --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-nonfree --enable-libvidstab --enable-libfreetype --enable-libharfbuzz
Now I could generate my stabilized video, and the end result was quite decent:
/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i 2023-08-18_16-28-05_IMG_6679.MOV -vf vidstabdetect=shakiness=10:accuracy=15 -f null - /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i 2023-08-18_16-28-05_IMG_6679.MOV -vf vidstabtransform=smoothing=30:input="transforms.trf" -c:v libx264 -preset veryfast -crf 12 -tune film 2023-08-18_16-28-05_IMG_6679_stabilized.MOV # Generate side-by-side view /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -i 2023-08-18_16-28-05_IMG_6679.MOV -i 2023-08-18_16-28-05_IMG_6679_stabilized.MOV -vcodec libx264 -filter_complex "[0:v]setpts=PTS-STARTPTS, pad=iw*2:ih[bg]; [1:v]setpts=PTS-STARTPTS[fg]; [bg][fg]overlay=w" 2023-08-18_16-28-05_IMG_6679_sbs.MOV
If you have a lot of videos that you need to stabilize, I wrote a quick script that will take the input and output folders as command-line arguments and process all input video files using decent presets. You can get more info about various ffmpeg video stabilization, compression, and encoding options here.
Experienced Unix/Linux System Administrator with 20-year background in Systems Analysis, Problem Resolution and Engineering Application Support in a large distributed Unix and Windows server environment. Strong problem determination skills. Good knowledge of networking, remote diagnostic techniques, firewalls and network security. Extensive experience with engineering application and database servers, high-availability systems, high-performance computing clusters, and process automation.
