@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 verifies its SHA-256 against the pinned digest in checksums.json
5. Sets executable permissions (only if verification passed)

On a checksum mismatch the partially downloaded file is removed and the install fails.

Maintenance: every FFmpeg version bump (the release tag in install.mjs) must regenerate checksums.json. For each supported target: curl -sL "<base-url>/ffmpeg-<platform>-<arch>.gz" | gunzip | shasum -a 256

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) | | FFMPEG_SKIP_CHECKSUM | Set to 1 to skip SHA-256 verification of the downloaded binary — only for custom builds served via FFMPEG_BINARIES_URL |