I was not able to view built-in videos on twitter and other websites so I wanted to install ffmpeg. I ran the command snap install ffmpeg and it didn't work but after running the command sudo apt-get install ffmpeg it installed too many files and it worked. What is the difference here?
2 Answers
Below distinction will not explain the issues you experienced installing ffmpeg.
Snaps
From Wikipedia: "Snap (package manager)":
Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system.
The snaps are furthermore mounted as loopback filesystems.
Packages installed from Ubuntu repositories
Packages installed via aptitude (e.g. apt-get install
command) can require and result in further dependencies being separately installed.
See this technical comparison for a detailed explanation.
For the end user, the most important issue is the available version.
Here is the latest version of ffmpeg
as a deb package.
$ apt policy ffmpeg
ffmpeg:
Installed: 7:3.4.8-0ubuntu0.2
Candidate: 7:3.4.8-0ubuntu0.2
Version table:
*** 7:3.4.8-0ubuntu0.2 500
500 http://es.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/universe amd64 Packages
500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security/universe amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
7:3.4.2-2 500
500 http://es.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe amd64 Packages
Here is the snap package,
$ snap info ffmpeg
name: ffmpeg
summary: A complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.
publisher: Snapcrafters
store-url: https://snapcraft.io/ffmpeg
contact: https://github.com/snapcrafters/ffmpeg/issues
license: GPL-3.0+
description: |
FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode,
transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that
humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient
formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some
standards committee, the community or a corporation.
This snap is maintained by the Snapcrafters community, and is not
necessarily endorsed or officially maintained by the upstream developers.
snap-id: Ee7LGphwQR669pcfCCdl0oJQouta69to
channels:
latest/stable: 4.3.1 2020-11-08 (1286) 83MB -
latest/candidate: ↑
latest/beta: ↑
latest/edge: 4.3.1 2021-03-04 (1297) 123MB -
Therefore, the snap package of ffmpeg
is at version 4.3 (2021-02-20). The deb package of ffmpeg
is at version 3.4 (2020-07-04).
A side-effect of security for the snap package, is that you cannot play video files from /tmp/
. Just that issue.
-
When I install ffmpeg from snap, Firefox cannot display videos on Twitter and some other websites. If I install from apt there is no hassle. That is bad because I want to install it from snap as I have downloaded the package on a flash disk and can install offline. Mar 28, 2021 at 9:49
-
1Firefox can use the gstreamer ffmpeg plugin to play videos. The snap package for ffmpeg has the application only.– user4124Mar 28, 2021 at 16:50
-
I searched for gstream plugins (sudo apt search gstream ) but can't see any file related to ffmpeg. Mar 29, 2021 at 13:45
-
There is a
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra
. I could not find the one for Firefox but did not search that much.– user4124Mar 29, 2021 at 18:05
sudo apt update && sudo apt install
. Not every installation hassnapd
running. I don't for example simply because I don't have time to baby-sit it.