How to use ffmpeg on windows

FFmpeg is indeed a powerful video encoder/decoder tool¹. It operates in the command line, as opposed to using a GUI. Command line is that black window you find by typing [windows+r], then cmd in the popup field and hitting enter. This is also called «command prompt». Once setup, you enter FFmpeg commands in one of these windows to use it.

Here are the basic steps to «install» and use it:

Installation

1. Download the latest FFmpeg build, courtesy of gyan.dev.
2. Create a folder on your computer to unpack the zip file. This folder will be your «installation» folder. I chose C:Program Filesffmpeg. This is a good idea because you will treat this like a regular program. Unpack the zip file into this folder.
3. The folder should now contain a number of other folders, including one titled bin where ffmpeg.exe is saved. We’re not done yet. Double clicking that file does nothing. Remember, this is a command line program. It runs in cmd.
4. Before you can use ffmpeg.exe in cmd you have to tell your computer where it can find it. You need to add a new system path. First, right click This PC (Windows 10) or Computer (Windows 7) then click Properties > Advanced System Settings > Advanced tab > Environment Variables.
5. In the Environment Variables window, click the «Path» row under the «Variable» column, then click Edit
   
6. The «Edit environment variable» window looks different for Windows 10 and 7. In Windows 10 click New then paste the path to the folder that you created earlier where ffmpeg.exe is saved. For this example, that is C:Program Filesffmpegbin
   
   In Windows 7 all the variables are listed in a single string, separated by a semicolon. Simply go the the end of the string, type a semicolon (;), then paste in the path.
   
7. Click Ok on all the windows we just opened up. Just to be sure, reboot your computer before trying any commands.

FFmpeg is now «installed». The Command Prompt will now recognize FFmpeg commands and will attempt to run them. (If you are still having issues with Command Prompt not recognizing FFmpeg try running CMD as an admin. Alternatively, you can use windows powershell instead of cmd. If it still does not work double check to make sure each step was followed to completion.)

Alternative installation methods

I’ve not tried these myself, but they probably work, and they’re easy to do. However, you can accidentally mess up important things if you’re not careful.

First, if you open cmd with administrator privileges, you can run setx /m PATH "C:ffmpegbin;%PATH%", and change C:ffmpegbin to your path to FFmpeg. This uses cmd to do all the gui steps listed above. Easy peasy.

Second, user K7AAY reports that you can simply drop the FFmpeg executables in C:WindowsSystem32 and run them from there without having to define the path variable because that path is already defined.

Updating FFmpeg

To update FFmpeg, just revisit the download page in step 1 above and download the zip file. Unpack the files and copy them over the old files in the folder you created in step 2.

Using FFmpeg

Using FFmpeg requires that you open a command prompt window, then type FFmpeg specific commands. Here is a typical FFmpeg command:

 ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -vn -ar 44100 -ac 1 -b:a 32k -f mp3 audio.mp3

This command has four parts:

1. ffmpeg — This command tells cmd that we want to run FFmpeg commands. cmd will first look for ffmpeg.exe in one of the folders from step 6 in the Installation section. If it is found, it will attempt to run the command.
2. -i video.mp4 — This is an input file. We are going to be doing work on this file.
3. -vn -ar 44100 -ac 1 -b:a 32k -f mp3 — These are the «arguments». These characters are like mini commands that specify exactly what we want to do. In this case, it is saying create an mp3 file from the input source.

• -vn — Leave out the video stream
• -ar 44100 — Specifies audio resolution in hertz.
• -ac 1 — Audio channels, only 1. This is effectively «make mono».
• -b:a 32k — Audio bitrate, set to 32 kbps.
• -f mp3 — Force to MP3 conversion. Without this command, FFmpeg attempts to interpret what you want based on the extension you use in the output file name.

1. audio.mp3— This is the output file.

As you can probably guess, this short command makes an MP3 audio file from an MP4 file.

To run this command, assuming you have an MP4 file to try this on, follow these steps:

1. Hit the Windows key + r.
2. Type cmd then enter.
3. Change the path to where the file is that you want to work on. Type cd [path]. It should look something like cd C:UsersnameDesktop.
4. Now type the FFmpeg command with the name of your input file. The command will run with some feedback. When it’s done, cmd will be available for more commands.

This is the basic way to use FFmpeg. The commands can get far more complicated, but that’s only because the program has so much power. Using the FFmpeg documentation, you can learn all the commands and create some very powerful scripts. After that, you can save these scripts into a .bat file so that you just have to double click a file instead of type out the whole command each time. For example, this answer contains a script that will create MP3’s from all the MP4’s in a folder. Then we would be combining the power of FFmpeg with the power of cmd, and that’s a nice place to be when you have to do professional quality video/audio encoding on mountains of files.

1. As a point if technical accuracy, FFmpeg is itself not an encoder or decoder. FFmpeg is a multimedia framework which can process almost all common and many uncommon media formats. It has thousands of to capture, decode, encode, modify, combine, and stream media, and it can make use of dozens of external libraries to do even more. Gyan.dev provides a succinct description.

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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!

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!

Ever needed to extract the audio file from a certain video you had on your personal computer? Or perhaps wanted to convert a video file from one format to another? If not, you surely must have desired to compress a video file to be a specific size or playback in a different resolution. All of these and many other audio-video related operations can be performed by using a simple command-line tool known as FFmpeg. Unfortunately, installing FFmpeg is not as easy as using it but that is where we come in. Explained below is a step by step guide on how to install this multipurpose tool on your personal computers.

What is FFmpeg?

Before we walk you through the installation process, let’s have a quick look at what FFmpeg really is and what are the different scenarios in which the tool can come in handy.

FFmpeg stands for Fast Forward Moving Picture Experts Group. It is a very popular open-source multimedia project available on a variety of operating systems and is capable of performing a plethora of operations on any and all audio formats & video formats out there. Even the archaic ones. The project contains multiple software suites and libraries enabling it to perform a variety of video and audio edits. The program is so powerful that it finds its way into many popular applications such as VLC media player and in the core of most online video converting services along with streaming platforms like Youtube and iTunes.

Using the tool one can do tasks like:

• encoding,
• decoding,
• transcoding,
• converting formats,
• mux,
• demux,
• stream,
• filter,
• extract,
• trim,
• scale,
• concatenate, etc. on various audio and video formats.

Also, being a command-line tool implies that one can perform operations right from the Windows command prompt using very simple single-line commands; a few of which are provided at the end of this article. These commands are quite versatile as they remain the same over different operating systems. However, the lack of a graphical user interface makes things a little complicated when it comes to installing the program on your personal computer.

As mentioned earlier, installing FFmpeg on Windows 10 is not as simple as installing any other regular application. While most applications can be installed by simply left-clicking on their respective .exe files and following the on-screen prompts/instructions, installing FFmpeg on your system requires a little more effort because of it being a command-line tool. The whole installation process is divided into three big steps; each containing multiple sub-steps.

Step-by-Step Guide of FFmpeg Installation Process

Nevertheless, we are here to guide you through the entire process in an easy to follow, step by step manner, and help you install FFmpeg on your Windows 10 PC. 

Of course, the first step to install any software will be to install it from official sources.

1. Open the Google Chrome app from the Windows search bar as shown.

2. Visit the official FFmpeg website.

3. Click on the Windows build by BtbN option as shown.

4. Click on the ffmpeg-master-latest-win64-gpl.zip link to download the zip file.

Note: In case you are unaware of your processor architecture, open Windows file explorer by pressing Windows + E keys. Go to This PC, right-click and select Properties. In the Properties dialog box, you can find your processor architecture next to the System type label.

For example: The x64-based processor in the below screenshot implies the processor is 64-bit.

5. Once downloaded, open the Downloads folder, right-click on the downloaded zip file and choose Extract to… option to extract all the contents to a new folder of the same name as depicted below.

6. Right-click on the newly extracted folder and select Rename as shown.

7. Carefully type in FFmpeg and hit Enter to Save.

Also Read: How To Install Hex Editor Notepad++ in Windows 10

Step II: Moving FFmpeg Folder to C Drive

It is important to understand the location is as important as the command prompt will only execute properly if the FFmpeg files are present in the correct locale.

1. Right-click on the FFmpeg folder and select Copy as depicted.

2. Naviagte to Default Windows installation drive, usually C: drive, right-click on a blank area and select Paste as shown.

3. Open the pasted folder once and make sure there are no FFmpeg subfolders inside.

Note: If there are any subfolders found, then move all the files such as, bin, doc, presets, LICENSE.txt and README.txt to the root folder and delete the subfolder. This is how the FFmpeg folder should look like.

Also Read: How to Install or Uninstall OneDrive in Windows 10

Step III: Installing FFmpeg on Windows 10

Its now time to install FFmpeg from the extracted & moved folder as follows:

1. Press the Windows key on your keyboard, search for Edit the system environment variables. Once found, hit Enter to open as shown.

2. In the System Properties dialog box, switch to Advanced tab.

3. Next, click on Environmental Variables… button shown highlighted.

4. Select Path under the User variables for [username] column by clicking on it. Post selection, click on Edit... button.

5. On Edit environment variable, click on New as shown.

6. Carefully type C:ffmpegbin followed by OK to save the changes.

7. After making the said entry, the Path in Environment Variables should look like this.

8. Press OK to close Environment Variables and save the changes made.

Also Read: How to install Internet Explorer on Windows 10 

Step IV: Verify FFmpeg Installation Via Command Prompt

The final part does not have anything to do with the installation process but will help verify if you were able to correctly install FFmpeg on your personal computer.

1. Search for command prompt as shown. Once located, select Run as administrator option as shown.

2. In the Administrator: Command Prompt window, type ffmpeg -version and press Enter key.

3A. If you managed to successfully install FFmpeg on your Windows PC, it should display details such as build, FFmpeg version, default configuration, etc. as depicted in the pic below.

3B. In case you weren’t able to install FFmpeg properly, the command prompt will return the following message:

‘ffmpeg’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file.

In such a scenario, go through the above guide thoroughly once again and rectify any mistakes you might have made.

Also Read: How to Install Autotune VST Plugin in Audacity

How to Use FFmpeg?

It all might as well be for nothing if you don’t know how to use this multipurpose tool. Fortunately, using FFmpeg is much simpler than installing the program itself. All you need to do is open command prompt as administrator or PowerShell and type in the command line for the task you wish to execute. Below is a list of command lines for various audio-video operations that one might wish to perform.

1. To perform any kind of edits using FFmpeg, you will need to open the command prompt or Powershell in the folder containing the files you wanna work with. Open the folder with your files in it, hold shift & right-click in an empty area and from the list of options select Open Powershell window here.

2. Let’s say you want to change the format of a particular video file from .mp4 to .avi . To do so, type the below line carefully in command prompt/powershell and press Enter:

ffmpeg -i sample.mp4 sample.avi

Note: Replace sample with the name of the video file you wish to convert.

3. The conversion may take some time depending on the file size and your PC hardware. The .avi file will be available in the same folder after the conversion has finished.

Other popular FFmpeg commands include:

• Get audio/video file information: ffmpeg -i sample.mp4
  

• Convert video file to audio file:   ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vn output.mp3
  

• Change video resolution: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter:v scale=1280:720 -c:a copy output.mp4

• Compress an audio file: ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -ab 128 output.mp3
  

• Remove audio from a video file: ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -an output.mp4
  

• Preview a video: ffplay sample.mp4

Note: Remember to replace ‘sample’, ‘input’, ‘output’ with respective file names

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So, hopefully, by following the above steps you will be able to install FFmpeg on Windows 10. But if you still have any queries or suggestions then feel free to reach out in the comment section.