FFMPEG error while loading shared libraries: libass.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Question

Problem: I recently 'updated' to Ubuntu 14.10 from Ubuntu 14.04. Since then, whenever I try to issue any command to FFMPEG, I get the following:

$ ffmpeg -i
ffmpeg: error while loading shared libraries: libass.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I've searched the internet extensively, tried recompiling FFMPEG from source using the guide here: https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Ubuntu and have tried reinstalling libavutil-dev all with no effect.

Can anybody suggest what might be causing FFMPEG to suddenly lose its ability to communicate with libass after my Ubuntu 14.10 update?

Thanks! :)

Solution 1

OK, now solved.

For future reference, whatever Ubuntu have changed in their update to 14.10, they've obviously changed the location or naming or something of their libass, because when I tried building it from source instead of installing from repository, it worked fine...

For reference, when building ffmpeg sources, instead of:

sudo apt-get install libx264-dev

use:

cd ~/ffmpeg_sources
wget http://download.videolan.org/pub/x264/snapshots/last_x264.tar.bz2
tar xjvf last_x264.tar.bz2
cd x264-snapshot*
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" ./configure --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" --bindir="$HOME/bin" --enable-static
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" make
make install
make distclean

And it works fine... :)

Solution 2

Try installing the missing package:

sudo apt-get install libass4