I’ve had my Arch Linux desktop system for several years now. Over that time, cruft has built up. It bit me today when I tried to install makemkv. No matter what I tried I could not get it to compile. Configure constantly failed an this step:

checking whether LIBAVCODEC_VERSION_MAJOR is declared... yes
checking LIBAVCODEC_VERSION_MAJOR... 52
...
configure: error: The libavcodec library is too old. Please get a recent one from http://www.ffmpeg.org

I had to systematically delete anything containing ffmpeg, then re-install ffmpeg, in order to finally get it to work.

Get a list of installed packages containing ffmpeg:

yay -Ss ffmpeg | grep Installed

Remove ffmpeg-containing packages:

yay -R chromaprint-fftw grilo-plugins gst-plugins-bad cheese gnome-music gnome-video-effects totem ffmpeg-compat-54 ffmpeg-compat-57 ffmpeg0.10 ffmpeg4.4 vlc libavutil-52 faudio

Install makemkv:

yay -S makemkv

My “nuke all ffmpeg from orbit” approach worked. After I did so, makemkv compiled!