Ubuntu 14.04.3 can't export video

[Mad Professor]

Hi All.

I have been trying to export some event videos from my Ubuntu 14.04.3 server, I get the following message "Video Generation Failed!".

Looking at the ZoneMinder log it says "Unable to generate video, check /usr/share/zoneminder/events/1/15/09/30/17/50/00/ffmpeg.log for details" this file does not exist.

After doing some research it seems that that Ubuntu 14.04 no longer has ffmpeg.

I tried to manually install ffmpeg via apt-get, and I get the following:

apt-get install ffmpeg

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package ffmpeg is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

Can you please advice me how to go about installing ffmpeg so that I can export the event videos.

Thanks for your time.

Best Regards.

[knight-of-ni]

Ubuntu ships with libav, rather than ffmpeg because that is what Debian based distros decided to do.

The good news is that I hear rumors they have come back to their senses. I'd expect libav to be replaced by ffmpeg again in the future. I don't know how long this will take though.

In the meantime, the simplest solution is to just change PATH_FFMPEG under options to point to the avconv binary, rather than ffmpeg.