ffmpeg broke due to a Debian upgrade. Neither does happen often, the German Perl Workshop happens once every year, and a Debian upgrade maybe every two years. But still.
I'm in the process of preparing the videos of the 2026 German Perl Workshop, and it occurred to me that I can simply patch the Debian distribution and recompile it instead of cloning the ffmpeg repository and then hunting down the prerequisites etc. .
So, without further ado here is the process which the good folks at Debian already documented quite well:
ffmpeg source apt source ffmpeg
debian/rulesTo append our new instructions, we need to edit the CONFIG command in debian/rules and append at the end of the stanza:
--enable-nonfree --enable-cuda-nvcc --enable-libnpp --extra-cflags=-I/usr/include/cuda --extra-ldflags=-L/usr/lib/cuda --cpu=native
debuild -b -uc -us
sudo apt install ../ffmpeg_7.1.5-0+deb13u1_amd64.deb
/usr/bin/ffmpeg 2>&1 |grep -i cuda --color
This should list --enable-cuda-nvcc somewhere.
Tags: Debian
]]>