Using -movflags faststart in Libav

Question

I am currently developing a video platform and for this purpose I am using libav in the backend for all the required video encoding. On my developer machine "Windows8" everything works fine. However, on the production environment "Debian" I always get an error when trying to encode a video.

It looks like unlike the Libav Version installed on my local Window8 machine, the one installed on the Debian system doesn't know the -movflags faststart option. I therefore updated the libav and the libx264 package but it didn't help.

I thought, maybe the Debian distributed version was somehow compiled in a different way than the windows version, so I downloaded the source of 9.11 version of avlib, installed all the required encoder packages i.e. libx264-dev libvpx-dev, libvorbis-dev and so on and compiled the whole thing manually. Guess what - he still doesn't know the -movflags faststart option.

Ok, no problem I thought, then I was missing the responsible compiler flag and startet reading the output from ./configuration --help. This however didn't give me a clue on which flag could be responsible for this. I startet reading the libav documentation for hours -> nothing. This -movflags faststart is mentioned in the documentation, but theres not a single word about how libav has to be compiled in order to make it available.

I then tried to register on the mails list of libav twice -> no response. I googled for almost half a day -> nothing. The -movflags faststart is mentioned every now and then but without any clue under which condition this flag is available.

I fianlly ended up studying the entire source code but even there, I cannot find a single codeline concerning this -movflags faststart. How is this possible??

So here I am, asking you guys, do you have any idea, what I have to do to make this -movflags faststart option to work on my productive debian machine??

Any help is appreciated!!

Best regards Samuel

Answer 1

to have the -movflags you need a release/10 please use

https://libav.org/releases/libav-10_beta2.tar.gz

or later.