@effing/ffmpeg

Platform-specific FFmpeg binary downloader.

Part of the Effing family — programmatic video creation with TypeScript.

Downloads a platform-specific FFmpeg binary at install time from the effing-ffmpeg-builds GitHub releases (currently tag v6.1.5, FFmpeg 6.1.5).

Usage

import { pathToFFmpeg } from "@effing/ffmpeg";

// pathToFFmpeg is the absolute path to the binary, or null on unsupported platforms

How it works

The install lifecycle script (node install.mjs) runs during pnpm install and:

1. Detects the current platform and architecture
2. Skips the download if the binary already exists
3. Downloads the gzipped binary from GitHub releases
4. Decompresses it and sets executable permissions

The binary is placed in the package root (packages/ffmpeg/ffmpeg). In the monorepo, pnpm symlinks mean all workspace consumers share the same binary.

Supported platforms

| Platform | Architectures | | -------- | ------------- | | darwin | x64, arm64 | | linux | x64, arm64 | | win32 | x64 |

Environment variables

| Variable | Description | | --------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | FFMPEG_BINARIES_URL | Override the base URL for binary downloads (defaults to the effing-ffmpeg-builds GitHub release) |