ffmpeg

The essential tool to working with video/audio.

ffmpeg is a "A complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video." For our intents and purposes, we use it to manipulate audio and video streams.

What does this tool do?

ffmpeg is a tool that allows you to record, convert, and stream audio and video. It can be used to edit and manipulate audio and video streams in various ways using CLI.

Note: If you are using other tools, you shouldn't need to interact with this tool directly. However, it is required by other tools, for example yt-dlp

Setup

Windows

Really simple, all you have to do is grab the current release build.

After doing so, extract the archive and run the following command to tell Windows where your ffmpeg program is located. For example, let's assume you extracted your archive on C:\Users\suichan\Downloads\ffmpeg-5.1.2-essentials_build:

setx /M PATH "%PATH%;C:\Users\suichan\Downloads\ffmpeg-5.1.2-essentials_build\bin\ffmpeg.exe"

Linux

Debian-base

For anything debian-based (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and, well, Debian),

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

sudo apt install ffmpeg

To test that ffmpeg is installed, run

ffmpeg -version

ArchLinux (and anything that has AUR)

yay -Syyu
yay -S ffmpeg

To test that ffmpeg is installed, run

ffmpeg -version