Q:

Building FFmpeg on RHEL4

StackOverflow has yet to fail me, so don't let me down this time!
I need to build FFmpeg on RHEL4 ... yes, 4!
The version of make on RHEL4 is 3.80, and the Makefile that ./configure generates when configuring FFmpeg does not seem to be compatible. When I make it throws a parse error every time.
This happens on pretty much every software pkg I try and build.
My applications group (at work) will not upgrade this machine, so please skip the suggestions to upgrade to RHEL5 or 6.
What are my options for installing FFmpeg?

A:

Your question specified that doing a proper upgrade (i.e., upgrading the system's GNU Make package) is out of the question. However, since you have privileges to the system C compiler, I recommend building GNU Make 3.82 (latest and greatest) and installing it in your home directory for personal use.
Software is at: http://mirrors.kernel.org/gnu/make/
Unpack it, configure, build, and install:
./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Note that the last step is not prefixed by 'sudo'. This will install 'make' as ~/bin/make. After configuring FFmpeg, call '~/bin/make` and everything should build fine.
I just tested this myself.

