Troubleshooting FFmpeg Issues on Ubuntu 16.04: Missing CUDA Runtime Library

As a user of Ubuntu 16.04, I recently encountered an issue with FFmpeg that left me scratching my head. After upgrading my system to the latest version, FFmpeg started throwing an error whenever I tried to use it. The error message indicated that the library libcudart.so.5.5 was missing.

At first, I was confused as to why FFmpeg was even trying to link to this library in the first place. Further research revealed that this issue is likely related to an NVIDIA driver upgrade (nvidia-367), which is a dependency of the CUDA runtime library. Unfortunately, my graphics card is a bit outdated, and I suspect that this may have contributed to the problem.

After running `find` commands to locate the missing library, I was unable to find it anywhere on my system or in any other version of libcudart. To confirm my suspicions, I used the `ldd` command to check if the CUDA runtime library was indeed missing. The output of this command revealed that everything else was fine except for this one library.

My research led me to conclude that the issue may have arisen when I upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04. On my old laptop running 16.04, FFmpeg used to work just fine until it suddenly broke at some point.

In summary, if you are experiencing issues with FFmpeg on Ubuntu 16.04 and receive an error message about a missing CUDA runtime library, it may be related to an NVIDIA driver upgrade. In this case, the closest thing in the repository that you need is libcudart7.5, which is a later version of the library. I hope this helps others who may encounter similar issues with FFmpeg on Ubuntu 16.04.

Ubuntu install ffmpeg 16.04