FFMPEG PHP installation on windows

We recently had a request from a client to install FFMPEG and the associated PHP module on a Windows server that was running Plesk 8.2 with PHP 5.2. This posed a bit of a problem because the FFMPEG project only releases source code releases, relying on others to make binary distributions. For linux distributions, it's usually in the package repository, but for windows, you have to dig around the internet until you can find someone that has compiled it for you, or you can compile it yourself. In addition, they refuse to go out of their way to make their code Windows friendly, which is fine, but it makes the process to compile it kind of complicated, since it doesn't work in Microsoft's C/C++ compiler by default, so you have to configure MinGW to compile it.

Finding a windows distribution of the main FFMPEG project was fairly easy. This site distributes binaries and also provides a very good guide on compiling it for yourself.

However, the PHP module is much harder. Especially since you have to find a module that is compatible with your version of PHP. Most of the available instructions point to PHP 4 modules, if you need a PHP 4 module, here is one good set of instructions. After much digging, I finally found a PHP 5 module here.

UPDATED: This link is now broken, we're currently hosting the PHP 5 module on our website here.

A complete set of instructions for completing this installation is below. My environment was Windows 2003, IIS 6, Plesk 8.2 and PHP 5.2.6:

• If you plan to use the FFMPEG command-line tool, download the binary package from arrozcru.org. Use a tool such as 7-zip to decompress it and expand the tar file where you want to place it.
• Download the zip file that includes the ffmpeg-php extension here and uncompress it. It includes several other software packages, you can ignore them, the files that we are interested in are in the ffmpeg-php-win32-all directory. UPDATED: This link is now broken, we're currently hosting the PHP 5 module on our website here.
  
• Copy the avcodec-51.dll, avformat-51.dll, avutil-49.dll and pthreadGC2.dll files to the c:\windows\system32 directory.
• Copy the php_ffmpeg.dll file to your PHP extensions directory. For me, this was "C:\Program Files\SWsoft\Plesk\Additional\PleskPHP5\ext"
• Edit your php.ini file and add the following bit. For me this was located at "C:\Program Files\SWsoft\Plesk\Additional\PleskPHP5\php.ini"
  
  extension=php_ffmpeg.dll
  
  
• If you are running PHP as an ISAPI filter, you'll probably need to restart IIS. I was running it as a CGI and I didn't need to restart.