# multimedia/vlc or library configuration to encode MP3 files



## Uniballer (Oct 26, 2014)

I have searched for this and came up dry for FreeBSD (plenty of references for Linux).

Using multimedia/vlc I want to be able to extract the audio track from an MP4 file and convert it as an MP3 file. This works on other platforms, but it is unclear to me how to make it work on FreeBSD. I get the following error:


```
Streaming / Transcoding failed:

It seems your Libav/FFmpeg (libavcodec) installation lacks the following encoder:

MPEG I/II Layer 3.

If you don't know how to fix this, ask for support from your distribution.



This is not an error inside VLC media player.

Do not contact the VideoLAN project about this issue.
```

I do not see an option in the multimedia/vlc configuration that explicitly adds an MP3 encoder (e.g. LAME). The multimedia/libav port does not appear to be used by multimedia/vlc. Somebody must have this working. What am I missing?


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## protocelt (Oct 27, 2014)

While I don't know a direct answer to your problem, you could just use multimedia/ffmpeg directly from a terminal if installed in the mean time.
`ffmpeg -i filename.mp4 filename.mp3`
It is what I do on the very few occasions I need to convert a file in a similar manner. See ffmpeg(1) for more options.


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