How to install ffmpeg on windows

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Introduction

FFmpeg is a command-line audio and video converter available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. This open-source tool helps users manipulate multimedia content and offers free access to several audio and video libraries.

Even though FFmpeg doesn’t have a clickable GUI, the installation process is straightforward.  

In this guide, you will learn how to install FFmpeg on Windows in four simple steps.

Prerequisites

• A system running Windows (This tutorial uses Windows 10).
• A file archiver (This guide uses 7-Zip).
• Command Prompt or Windows PowerShell access.
• Administrator privileges.

How To Install FFmpeg on Windows

Installing FFmpeg on Windows requires adding the utility to the Windows PATH. Additionally, users can manually navigate to the folder containing the executable and run the program. However, the process is time-consuming and impractical.

A straightforward way to work with FFmpeg is to add it to PATH by editing Windows environment variables. Therefore, Windows knows where to look for the executable. Users can run FFmpeg directly from the command line without typing in the full path to the app’s folder.

Step 1: Download FFmpeg for Windows

Visit the FFmpeg download page. The More downloading options section has FFmpeg packages and executable files for Linux, Windows, and Mac. To get the Windows version:

1. Hover over the Windows logo and click the Windows builds from gyan.dev link. A new page opens.

2. In the git master builds section, look for the latest version of the FFmpeg build. Click the ffmpeg-git-full-7z link to download the full build since that version has the most up-to-date libraries.

3. Choose the download location and save the file if the download does not start automatically.

Step 2: Extract the Downloaded Files

Once downloaded, extract the contents:

1. Locate the downloaded file. The default location is the Downloads folder.

2. Right-click the file and hover over 7-Zip (or another file archiver of choice).

3. From the archiver submenu, choose Extract here. Wait for a few seconds for the extracting process to complete.

5. Rename the extracted folder to ffmpeg.

6. Move the folder to the root of the C drive or the folder of your choice.

Step 3: Add FFmpeg to PATH

Set Windows environment variables to add FFmpeg to the PATH. Follow these steps:

1. Type system variables into the search bar and click the Edit the system environment variables option.

2. Under the User variables section, select Path and click the Edit button.

3. Choose New from the side menu.

4. Add C:ffmpegbin to the empty field and confirm changes with OK.

The change in the Path variable line confirms the FFmpeg is added to PATH.

 Step 4: Verify FFmpeg PATH

To verify the FFmpeg is correctly added to the Windows PATH, open the Command Prompt or PowerShell and run:

ffmpeg

The output confirms the installation:

Conclusion

This article provided an easy step-by-step guide on installing FFmpeg on Windows.

For more tutorials refer to our article and learn how to install FFmpeg on MacOS.

Next, learn how to change or reset the administrator password on the Windows server.

FFmpeg is a popular software for processing, converting, or manipulating video and audio files. The program is used for endless things like rotating videos, scaling videos, extracting information about videos, and many others. It is an open-source program that is simply awesome for video scaling, format transcoding, decoding, encoding, demuxing, streaming, filtering, converting audio files, recording live audio/video, handling video and other multimedia files. This multimedia framework is designed for command-line-based processing of multimedia files, and you can make basic edits with single-line commands.

While the program is simple to use, accessing FFmpeg to execute commands is a little confusing. Installing and using FFmpeg can take a lot of time as you need to manually open the FFmpeg folder within the command prompt or Power Shell terminal to access the FFmpeg executive file to execute relevant commands for basic editing. If you are stuck with installing and using FFmpeg on your machine, you are in the right place.

To make things simple, all you have to do is install FFmpeg and add the FFmpeg program to the Windows path using Environment variables. This way you can directly access FFmpeg from a Command prompt or Power Shell in any directory. In this article, we explain how to install FFmpeg on Windows in order to access FFmpeg directly from Command Prompt or PowerShell

Get the latest FFmpeg build from the official website here. You can either download the 32-bit version or the 64-bit version that suits your system. Click the Download Build button to start downloading.

The program doesn’t work directly on Windows 10. You need to add a program to the system path using Environment Variables.

So navigate to the downloaded folder where the FFmpeg zip file is a store. Right-click on the Zip folder and click extract from the drop-down menu.

Select the folder or drive where you want to extract.

Next, rename the extracted folder. To rename the folder, right-click on a folder and click Rename from the drop-down menu with title FFmpeg-20180424-d9706f7-win64-static to FFmpeg.

Copy the FFmpeg folder and navigate to C drive. Paste the folder to the root of C drive.

Once done, the next step is to enable FFmpeg using Command Prompt.

Add FFmpeg to Windows path using Environment variables

To use FFmpeg in Command Prompt, you need first to add the bin folder containing the FFmpeg executable file to your Windows  path

In the Windows search menu, type Edit the system environment variables and click Enter. This will open the system properties window.

Navigate to Advanced button and click Environment Variables at the bottom of the window.

In the Environment Variables window, Select the variable Path and click Edit to change the Path variable.

Click New and type the path of FFmpeg folder “C:ffmpegbin” and click OK.

Type the path directory according to the drive or folder where you have placed  FFmpeg folder.

Once done, the path gets added to the Environment variables. Click OK to apply changes.

Verify FFmpeg path in Command Prompt

Launch Command Prompt and type the command FFmpeg in the command prompt terminal and hit Enter.

If the FFmpeg is added properly to Windows Path, the command prompt will display the details about FFmpeg like its version number, configuration, etc.

If you weren’t successful, it only means that your command prompt did not recognize the commands. Cross-check to see if you have added the FFmpeg folder to the system path properly.

Read: Fix Audacity FFmpeg error on Windows PC.

That’s all!

FFmpeg is a free and open-source command-line tool for transcoding multimedia files. It supports a wide variety of codecs and file formats, including AVI, MP4, FLV, MKV, WMV, and more.

With it you can convert video and audio files, edit them in various ways such as cutting or cropping videos, as well as encode and decode them. You can also use it to record your screen or webcam, or to create time-lapse videos, and much more.

It’s used by a lot of popular applications, such as VLC media player, HandBrake, and Adobe Premiere Pro, and many others.

Installing FFmpeg on Windows

To install FFmpeg on Windows is very easy, it’s just different than the usual install process.

All we have to do is download the FFmpeg software which is bundled in an archive, place it somewhere we’d keep software/utilities, such as in the C: drive, and add its location to the PATH environment variable.

The PATH environment variable is a list of directories that Windows will look in for executable files (EXE, DLL, BAT). This allows you to run programs from any directory without having to type the full path to the program. We want this so we can easily use ffmpeg from the command-line.

Download FFmpeg

To download FFmpeg:

1. Go to https://ffmpeg.org/download.html
2. Hover over the Windows logo in the bottom left of the screen.
3. Underneath it you’ll see two links appear. Click on Windows builds from gyan.dev
4. On that page click on ffmpeg-git-full.7z. It’s a link that will download the archive in 7zip format. If you can’t extract it make sure to download and install 7zip on your system.

Now extract the archive and rename it to something simple, like ffmpeg.

Next we’ll move the archive somewhere in the C: drive. I’ll move it right in C:. So the path will be C:ffmpeg in my case.

This is my C: drive with ffmpeg in it:

Next we want to add the path to the directory containing ffmpeg.exe (and a few other executables) to our PATH environment variable. That directory is ffmpegbin.

You can see for yourself if you go inside ffmpegbin:

Add FFmpeg to PATH

Like we said before the PATH is the system variable that your operating system uses to locate needed executables from the command-line.

You can do this in multiple ways, such as by using the command-line or using the Windows graphical interface.

The command-line method is faster and we’ll do it this way.

Add FFmpeg to PATH Using the Command-Line

To do this just open a command promp (cmd) as an Administrator and run:

setx /m PATH "C:ffmpegbin;%PATH%"

You can change C:ffmpegbin with something else, if you have placed ffmpeg elsewhere.

Here’s how it looks like when you run the command in the Command Prompt:

That’s it. If everything went well, we should be able to use ffmpeg from the command-line.

Check if FFmpeg is Installed on Windows

To check if ffmpeg is installed on Windows just run ffmpeg in the command line and it should output some information about our version of ffmpeg, such as available codecs, ffmpeg version, and some other things.

Well done. FFmpeg should now be installed on your Windows system and you can start using it to convert or encode your video and audio files.

Conclusion

In this tutorial we covered how to install FFmpeg on Windows. Hopefully it worked for you. If it didn’t feel free to leave us a comment and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Did you receive a video with those annoying black bars on the side? Do you wonder how you could change the orientation and remove those black bars? Or maybe you want to create a montage of your favorite pictures and make a music video. You can do all that for free when you install FFmpeg.

Not a reader? Watch this related video tutorial!

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In this guide, you will learn to install FFmpeg and how to use it by following many examples. By the end, you’ll have acquired the foundation to start converting and altering media files!

Prerequisites

This tutorial will be a hands-on demonstration. If you’d like to follow along, be sure you have the following.

• You’ll need a computer running on a compatible operating system, such as Windows, Linux (RHEL-based, Debian-based, or Ubuntu-based), and macOS. This tutorial will be using Ubuntu 20.04, Windows 10, and macOS Big Sur for the installation.

While the installation method varies, FFmpeg usage should be the same across different operating systems.

• Your computer must have at least 4GB of RAM and a two-core CPU. Multimedia processing is generally a resource-intensive task. As such, your computer must have decent hardware capacity.

Installing FFmpeg on Ubuntu

FFmpeg is available in the default repositories of most Linux distributions. Conveniently, you can install FFmpeg through your distro’s package manager, such as apt in Ubuntu.

To install FFmpeg on Ubuntu, follow these steps:

1. SSH into your Ubuntu server and update the apt package index.

2. Next, install FFmpeg and all the necessary libraries.

3. Finally, check the FFmpeg version you installed.

You will see an output similar to the following screenshot. Your version may be different.

Installing FFmpeg on Windows 10

So far, you have learned how to install FFmpeg on Ubuntu. Now, know two ways to install FFmpeg on Windows 10 in this section.

Method 1: Install FFmpeg via PowerShell

This method gives you more control over where to download and install FFmpeg on your computer. Best of all, you’ll perform everything within PowerShell.

To install FFmpeg on Windows 10, follow these steps.

1. Open a PowerShell as administrator on your computer.

2. Create the folder where you’ll download and install FFmpeg. This command creates the folder C:ffmpeg.

New-Item -Type Directory -Path C:ffmpeg ; Set-Location C:ffmpeg

3. Run the below command to download the latest FFmpeg release for Windows. This command saves the file as ffmpeg.zip.

curl.exe -L 'https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/ffmpeg-release-essentials.zip' -o 'ffmpeg.zip'

4. After downloading, extract the ffmpeg.zip file to the current directory. To do so, run the Expand-Archive command below.

# Expand the Zip
Expand-Archive .ffmpeg.zip -Force -Verbose

As you can see, the command extracted all files from the zip file. The only files you’ll need are the executable files.

5. Move the executable files to the top folder for simplicity and quick access.

# Move the executable (*.exe) files to the top folder
Get-ChildItem -Recurse `
    -Path .ffmpeg -Filter *.exe |
    ForEach-Object {
        Move-Item $_ -Destination . -Verbose
    }

6. Now, clean up the FFmpeg directory by deleting the unnecessary files and folder.

# Clean up
Remove-Item .ffmpeg -Recurse
Remove-Item .ffmpeg.zip
# List the directory contents
Get-ChildItem

At this point, only the executable files remain

7. Now, prepend the C:ffmpeg folder to the system path environment variable. This step ensures that you can run the ffmpeg.exe command from any directory without specifying the full path.

# Prepend the FFmpeg folder path to the system path variable
[System.Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(
    "PATH",
    "C:ffmpeg;$([System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable('PATH','MACHINE'))",
    "Machine"
)

8. For the new system variables to take effect, perform either one of the two options below.

Note: You only need to do either option once. Every subsequent PowerShell or CMD session will pick up the environment variables automatically.

Option 1: Close your current PowerShell session and open a new one.

Option 2: Run the below command in the current PowerShell session to import the machine’s PATH variable into the current session.

$env:Path = [System.Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path","Machine")

9. Finally, check the FFmpeg version by running the below command.

As you can see, you don’t need to specify the full path of the ffmpeg.exe executable file due to what you did in steps 5 and 6.

Method 2: Install FFmpeg via Chocolatey

Since Windows 10 does not have a default package manager like Ubuntu’s apt, an excellent alternative is to use Chocolatey.

Follow the steps below to install FFmpeg via Chocolatey.

1. If you don’t have Chocolatey yet, open an elevated PowerShell terminal and run the following code to install.

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

2. After installing Chocolatey, close your current PowerShell window and reopen a new one. On your new PowerShell window, run the following command to install FFmpeg.

Type Y and press Enter at the confirmation prompt.

3. Finally, check the FFmpeg version you installed.

Installing FFmpeg on macOS

If you’re using a macOS computer, the most convenient way to install FFmpeg is through Homebrew. Homebrew is a package manager for macOS but does not come out of the box.

1. Open a terminal window on your macOS computer.

2. If you don’t have Homebrew yet, run the below command to install it on your computer.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

3. Once you’ve installed Homebrew, run the below command in the terminal to install FFmpeg.

As you can see below, Homebrew automatically detects and installs every FFmpeg dependency.

Installing FFmpeg on macOS could take several minutes, especially when many dependencies are missing. Be patient.

4. Finally, check your version of FFmpeg by running the below command.

Listing Available Encoders and Decoders

FFmpeg is known for its media processing capabilities, especially in converting media formats. Converting media files between different formats involves encoding and decoding. What enables FFmpeg to convert media files are the encoders and decoders.

These encoders and decoders determine which media file formats FFmpeg can process. How do you know which encoders and decoders come with FFmpeg?

To display the list of encoders or decoders, run the commands below.

# Show encoders
ffmpeg -encoders
# Show decoders
ffmpeg -decoders

The below screenshots show only a portion of the available encoders and decoders. The legend at the beginning indicates whether the encoder supports video, audio, subtitles, etc.

Extracting Media File Information

After installing FFmpeg, the first thing you will want to do is to get the essential information about a media file. This information includes the duration of a video or which codecs were used during an audio file encoding.

To get a file’s media information, run the below command. Ensure to provide the correct filename after the -i option. The -f null – flag prevents FFmpeg from encoding the output to a file, where null means no file format and – means no filename.

This example uses a sample MP3 file named file_example_MP3_5MG.mp3 downloaded from this link.

ffmpeg -i .\file_example_MP3_5MG.mp3 -f null -

As you can see, the input file information shows the metadata, bitrate, duration, and container format, among others.

Converting Media Files with FFmpeg (Examples)

Suppose you have a WEBM video file that you want to watch on your smart TV. But your TV does not support the WEBM format. You can use FFmpeg to convert the WEBM file to a format that your TV supports, such as MP4.

This example uses a sample video file called file_example_WEBM_1920_3_7MB.webm downloaded from this link.

Example 1: Basic Conversion with Automatic Codec Selection

The command is as follows to perform a basic conversion of a video format. This command takes file_example_WEBM_1920_3_7MB.webm as the input, converts it, and saves the output file file_example_MP4_1920_3_7MB.mp4.

ffmpeg -i file_example_WEBM_1920_3_7MB.webm file_example_MP4_1920_3_7MB.mp4

Notice that you didn’t have to specify the output format? Because FFmpeg recognized the format since MP4 is well-known and uses the correct codecs and encoders.

Example 2: Changing the Container without Encoding

In some cases, you may want to change a file container into another without re-encoding the video or audio streams. One reason could be that you’ve already encoded the streams correctly but chose the wrong container in the first place.

To change contains without transcoding, run the below command. This command uses the -c:a copy and -c:v copy options to copy the audio and video streams from a WEBM into an MKV container.

ffmpeg -i file_example_WEBM_1920_3_7MB.webm -c:v copy -c:a copy file_example_MKV.mkv

Example 3: Changing the Video Resolution

What you are mainly playing videos on a small screen, perhaps on a mobile phone. Smaller screens may have fewer benefits with higher video resolutions, such as 1920×1080, and bigger file sizes.

In such cases, FFmpeg can resize a video to a smaller resolution, like 1280×720. To do so, run the following command. This command uses the -c:a copy option to copy the audio stream (without conversion), and the -s 1280×720 option specifies the output video resolution.

ffmpeg -i file_example_WEBM_1920_3_7MB.webm -c:a copy -s 1280x720 file_example_1280x720.webm

Example 4: Extracting Audio from a Video File

You can also use FFmpeg to extract the audio from a video file. This FFmpeg usage is widespread for converting music videos or instructional videos to audio files like MP3 and OGG.

To extract the audio from a video file, run the below command. This command uses the -vn option to disable the video stream and save the output to an MP3 file.

ffmpeg -i file_example_WEBM_1920_3_7MB.webm -vn file_example_WEBM.mp3

As you can see below, the input file had two streams; Stream#0:0 for video and Stream#0:1 for audio.

But the output only contains one stream, which is the audio-only since you’ve disabled the video stream.

Conclusion

FFmpeg is a powerful multimedia tool for converting media files between different formats and extracting audio from video files. This guide taught you how to install FFmpeg and used its command with several real-life examples.

With FFmpeg, you can make your media files work on any device or platform. So don’t be afraid to give it a try. Don’t stop here! There’s a lot more you can do with FFmpeg, like how to compress a large video file to save space or extract all the images from a movie to create a photo gallery.

For more ideas, check out the FFmpeg documentation. Thanks for reading, and happy learning!

Let’s learn how to install FFmpeg on Ubuntu, MacOS, and Windows – the easy and painless way. Often times, people spend too much time installing FFmpeg and not using it. Let’s solve that problem today!

For those who do not know, FFmpeg is one of the most important and popular video processing and compression libraries there is! It powers some of the most efficient encoders that are commercially available along with commonly used software like Handbrake and VLC player.

In this article, let’s start with the basics and see how to install FFmpeg on Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu. Let’s go!

On a Windows machine, it is a complex process to compile and install FFmpeg if you are not a programmer and don’t have access to coding tools.

However, for almost all purposes, you can head over to Zeranoe and download compiled .exe FFmpeg files and use that (or the shared libraries).

Update: Zeranoe is shutting down on Sept. 18, 2020 and I’ll provide weekly Win64 builds (static and shared) over here.

How to Install FFmpeg on MacOS?

On a Mac, you can install FFmpeg using brew which is a superb package manager for the MacOS ecosystem. Here is the one-liner to install FFmpeg on a Mac machine (testing and working on Cataline v 10.15.5)

brew install ffmpeg

If you want additional tools like Netflix’s VMAF on MacOS with FFmpeg, all you need to do is to include if when you install ffmpeg. For example,

brew install ffmpeg --with-libvmaf

The brew page is an excellent resource for all the possible options. Check there first before hunting on Google or Stackoverflow.

How to Install FFmpeg on Ubuntu?

On Ubuntu, you can install FFmpeg in a couple of ways – using the apt package manager or compiling from source.

Using apt

To simply install it using apt, use the following commandline,

sudo apt install ffmpeg

That’s it.

Compiling FFmpeg from Source

However, if you are installing FFmpeg on an Ubuntu machine, there is a high likelihood that you are going to tinker with FFmpeg and that means you might want to compile from the FFmpeg source.

To do so, you can use the procedure mentioned in the FFmpeg Official Installation Guide.

I’ve done it a few times, and there are a couple of dependencies missing in the official guide. Here is my procedure for compiling and installing FFmpeg from source on Ubuntu 18.04.

Step 1: Install the Dependencies (including nasm). And, remember to create the following folders

mkdir -p ~/ffmpeg_sources ~/bin

Step 2: Install the Video and Audio Codecs that you are going to need. I installed libx264, libx265-dev, libnuma-dev, libvpx-dev, libfdk-aac-dev, libmp3lame-dev, and libopus-dev.

Step 3: Install libunistring-dev to prevent the following error : ERROR: gnutls not found using pkg-config

sudo apt-get install libunistring-dev

Step 4: Download and compile FFmpeg from sources. Notice that we are now using --enable libvmaf to enable VMAF with FFmpeg.

cd ~/ffmpeg_sources && 
wget -O ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2 https://ffmpeg.org/releases/ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2 && 
tar xjvf ffmpeg-snapshot.tar.bz2 && 
cd ffmpeg && 
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib/pkgconfig" ./configure 
  --prefix="$HOME/ffmpeg_build" 
  --pkg-config-flags="--static" 
  --extra-cflags="-I$HOME/ffmpeg_build/include" 
  --extra-ldflags="-L$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib" 
  --extra-libs="-lpthread -lm" 
  --bindir="$HOME/bin" 
  --enable-gpl 
  --enable-gnutls 
  --enable-libass 
  --enable-libfdk-aac 
  --enable-libfreetype 
  --enable-libmp3lame 
  --enable-libopus 
  --enable-libvorbis 
  --enable-libvpx 
  --enable-libx264 
  --enable-libx265 
  --enable-nonfree && 
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH" make && 
make install && 
hash -r

That’s it – you should be up and running with FFmpeg now!