**Tested and works on an AWS EC2 Ubuntu instance, but should work on any Linux machine.**

- SSH into your instance and become root

  sudo su -

- cd to the the /usr/local/bin directory

  `cd /usr/local/bin`

- Inside the /usr/local/bin directory, create an "ffmpeg" directory

  `mkdir ffmpeg`

- cd into the new directory

  `cd ffmpeg`

- Check the static build directory at [http://ffmpeg.gusari.org/static/64bit/](http://ffmpeg.gusari.org/static/64bit/), select a version of ffmpeg or use the latest version alias, and wget it

  `wget http://ffmpeg.gusari.org/static/64bit/ffmpeg.static.64bit.latest.tar.gz`

- The file should now be in /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg. Untar it...

  `tar -xzf ffmpeg.static.64bit.2014-02-16.tar.gz`

- Run it and check what the latest version is 

  `./ffmpeg -version`

The output should look something like this
  ```
  ffmpeg version N-60675-g8fe1076
  built on Feb 16 2014 05:45:47 with gcc 4.6 (Debian 4.6.3-1)
  configuration: --prefix=/root/ffmpeg-static/64bit --extra-cflags='-I/root/ffmpeg-
  static/64bit/include -static' --extra-ldflags='-L/root/ffmpeg-static/64bit/lib -static' --
  extra-libs='-lxml2 -lexpat -lfreetype' --enable-static --disable-shared --disable-ffserver --
  disable-doc --enable-bzlib --enable-zlib --enable-postproc --enable-runtime-cpudetect --
  enable-libx264 --enable-gpl --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libmp3lame --
  enable-gray --enable-libass --enable-libfreetype --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libspeex --
  enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-version3 --enable-libvpx
  libavutil 52. 64.100 / 52. 64.100
  libavcodec 55. 52.102 / 55. 52.102
  libavformat 55. 32.101 / 55. 32.101
  libavdevice 55. 9.101 / 55. 9.101
  libavfilter 4. 1.102 / 4. 1.102
  libswscale 2. 5.101 / 2. 5.101
  libswresample 0. 17.104 / 0. 17.104
  libpostproc 52. 3.100 / 52. 3.100
  ```

- If you want to be able to execute FFMPEG from any directory, simply create a symlink into /usr/bin like this:

  `ln -s /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg/ffmpeg /usr/bin/ffmpeg`

**done.** You should be able to run the command "ffmpeg" from anywhere.

credit: [this AWS forum thread](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=332091)