base image choice, ffmpeg rpi4

Product support balenaOS
1

Hi there,

(not sure I’m in the right forum section - @mods feel free to move this)

I’m looking to build an app to do some ffmpeg workflow on my Raspberry Pi4.
I’m planing on using the following pre-build ffmpeg to save time not having to compile anything.

https://www.johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/

Two questions:
1- Which build should I go for?
arm64 or armhf

and,
2- which balena base image would be the most adapted / lightweight.
knowing that I don’t need anything else than this build of ffmpeg to run.

Thanks!

2

Hi @xyala,

BalenaOS for Raspberry Pi 4 is built for the aarch64 architecture. As a result you could technically the armhf builds, but picking the arm64 ffmpeg build will probably better utilize your hardware.

As of which base image you should pick, if you indeed don’t really need anything extra in your image (like let’s say python), choosing an alpine base image will probably give you the smallest resulting image size.
You can try using something like balenalib/aarch64-alpine:3.11-run and check whether it works for your use case:
https://hub.docker.com/r/balenalib/aarch64-alpine/tags?page=1&name=3.11-run

In case that doesn’t work easily, I would suggest you to also give a try to a respective debian based image like balenalib/aarch64-debian:jessie:
https://hub.docker.com/r/balenalib/aarch64-debian

Let us know in case you face any issues.

Kind regards,
Thodoris

4

Awesome, thanks - gonna give it a try!

5

Reporting on this.

amd64 with balenalib/aarch64-alpine:3.11-run works like a charm!

6

Thanks for reporting back, glad it’s working for you.