OpenAudible FFmpeg builds

This fork creates ffmpeg/ffprobe binaries used for OpenAudible, an audibobook management desktop application.

These binaries only include the codecs, filters, and muxers that are needed for OpenAudible (mp3/m4b/m4a and cover artwork).

We add a small patch to allow additional metadata in m4a/m4b tags.

We produce binaries for Linux (x86_64), Mac (universal binary for arm64 and x86_64), and Windows (x86_64 and arm64).

Thank you to AcousticID for their ffmpeg-build github actions. Incredible to build 4 static binaries for ffmpeg in under 6 minutes.

Building is done using GitHub Actions. You can find the built binaries on the releases page.

Linux Build Notes

Linux binaries are built using Docker with musl libc instead of glibc. This produces fully static binaries with no glibc dependency, meaning they run on any Linux distribution regardless of the system's glibc version. Without this, binaries compiled on a modern Ubuntu (glibc 2.35+) would fail on older systems like Ubuntu 20.04 or Debian 10.

• x86_64 builds run on an ubuntu-22.04 GitHub Actions runner using musl-gcc from the musl-tools apt package.
• arm64 builds run on an ubuntu-24.04-arm (native ARM64) runner, also using musl-gcc — no cross-compilation required.

The Dockerfile captures the build environment. The workflow builds the image, extracts the binaries with docker cp, runs a smoke test (ffmpeg -version), then uploads the artifacts.

Supported platforms:

• Linux
  • x86_64-linux-gnu
  • aarch64-linux-gnu
• Windows
  • x86_64-w64-mingw32
  • arm64-w64-mingw32
• macOS
  • Universal binary (supports both x86_64 and arm64 architectures)
  • Compatible with macOS 10.9+ (Intel) and macOS 11+ (Apple Silicon)