My bash script depends on ffmpeg which was removed when I upgraded to 14.04. What to do?

Question

I have a bash script to capture images using the webcam and it depended on ffmpeg. I recently upgraded from 13.10 to 14.04 and noticed that ffmpeg was removed and this script wouldn't work anymore. Searching led me to answers that suggested adding some ppa to repository and install ffmpeg. But I do not want to add any unofficial ppa. What to do? What is the official substitute for ffmpeg?

Answer 1

The script I used is as below:

#!/bin/bash
ts=`date +%s`
ffmpeg -f video4linux2 -s vga -i /dev/video0 -vframes 3 Downloads/grab-$ts.%01d.jpg
exit 0  #important - has to exit with status 0

Some search suggested using avconv, so I replaced the ffmpeg with avconv and the script worked as before.

avconv -f video4linux2 -s vga -i /dev/video0 -vframes 3 Downloads/grab-$ts.%01d.jpg