Installation

FFmpeg CLI

macOS

# Using Homebrew (recommended)
brew install ffmpeg

# Check version
ffmpeg -version

Linux

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg

# Fedora
sudo dnf install ffmpeg

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S ffmpeg

Windows

Option 1: Winget (recommended)

winget install ffmpeg

Option 2: Chocolatey

choco install ffmpeg

Option 3: Scoop

scoop install ffmpeg

Option 4: Manual

1. Download from gyan.dev or BtbN builds
2. Extract to C:\ffmpeg
3. Add C:\ffmpeg\bin to PATH

Verify Installation

After installing, verify with:

ffmpeg -version
ffprobe -version

Both should output version information without errors.

Common Dependencies

For full codec support, install the full suite:

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra

# macOS (Homebrew automatically includes most codecs)
brew install ffmpeg --with-all-codecs

GPU Acceleration

NVIDIA (Linux/Windows)

# Linux
sudo apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit

# Verify hardware acceleration
ffmpeg -hide_banner -encoders | grep nvenc

macOS VideoToolbox

# macOS supports hardware encoding out of the box
ffmpeg -hide_banner -encoders | grep videotoolbox

fluent-ffmpeg (Node.js)

npm install fluent-ffmpeg
# or
yarn add fluent-ffmpeg
# or
bun add fluent-ffmpeg

Requires FFmpeg CLI to be installed on the system (the above packages).

@ffmpeg/core (Browser/WASM)

npm install @ffmpeg/ffmpeg @ffmpeg/util

No system FFmpeg required — everything runs in the browser via WebAssembly.

For Vite projects, add COOP/COEP headers for multi-thread support:

// vite.config.ts
export default {
  server: {
    headers: {
      'Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy': 'same-origin',
      'Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy': 'require-corp',
    }
  }
}

File Access

Browser FFmpeg cannot read local files directly. Use the File API:

const input = await fetchFile(fileInput.files[0])
await ffmpeg.writeFile('input.mp4', input)