Appendix: Installing FFmpeg manually

You probably don’t need this

The app does not require you to install FFmpeg. It ships with its own copy of the FFmpeg libraries, installed alongside the program and loaded from its own folder. Playback, stepping, scanning, packages, layouts — everything the app does on screen — works out of the box with nothing extra installed. If you only ever watch and review footage, you can skip this appendix entirely.

This section exists for two situations:

• Two optional features use the FFmpeg command-line tools, which are separate from the bundled libraries: Fast Seek (chapter 11) and splitting a multi-angle file (chapter 4). Both run ffmpeg and ffprobe as programs, so those two need to be findable on your system PATH. If they aren’t, the app tells you plainly and does nothing else — it doesn’t fail or misbehave.
• You want FFmpeg available system-wide for your own use, or you’re building the app from source.

Everything below is standard Windows practice and applies to any program that wants FFmpeg on the PATH, not just this one.

1. Download a Windows build

FFmpeg doesn’t publish a Windows installer — you download a folder of programs and tell Windows where to find them. Two well-known builders:

From Gyan, take the release full build. From BtbN, take a release build for win64. Either is fine; the file you want is the 7-Zip archive (.7z) for 64-bit Windows — for example ffmpeg-release-full.7z.

The .7z format needs 7-Zip to open, which is free from https://www.7-zip.org/. Install that first if you don’t already have it. (Some builders also offer a .zip, which Windows opens natively — take that instead if you’d rather not install anything.)

2. Extract it somewhere permanent

Extract the archive to a stable location that won’t be cleared — C:\ffmpeg is the conventional choice. Do not leave it in Downloads, which people periodically empty; if the folder disappears later, the app will start reporting that ffmpeg is missing.

Right-click the archive → 7-Zip → Extract files… → set the destination to C:\ffmpeg.

The archive contains a single top-level folder (something like ffmpeg-7.1-full_build), so check where things actually landed. What you need is a bin folder containing the three programs:

C:\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe
C:\ffmpeg\bin\ffprobe.exe
C:\ffmpeg\bin\ffplay.exe

If you ended up with C:\ffmpeg\ffmpeg-7.1-full_build\bin\, either move the contents up so the path matches the above, or just use that longer path in the next step — what matters is that the path you add is the folder containing ffmpeg.exe.

3. Add it to the PATH

The PATH is the list of folders Windows searches when a program is asked for by name. Adding C:\ffmpeg\bin to it is what makes ffmpeg work from anywhere.

This is the step most people find fiddly, so here is each dialog in order.

Open the environment variables editor. Click Start and type environment variables. Choose Edit the system environment variables.

System Properties opens on the Advanced tab. Click the Environment Variables… button at the bottom.

The Environment Variables window has two lists: User variables at the top (just your account) and System variables below (every account on the machine).

Either works. Use the User list if you’re unsure — it needs no administrator rights and only affects you. Select Path in that list and click Edit….

The Edit environment variable window lists each folder on its own line. Click New, type C:\ffmpeg\bin, and press Enter.

Then click OK on that window, OK on the Environment Variables window, and OK on System Properties. All three need closing with OK — if you cancel any of them, the change is discarded.

4. Check it worked

PATH changes only reach programs started afterwards. Any command prompt already open still has the old PATH and will keep saying ffmpeg isn’t found — a genuinely common source of confusion.

Open a new Command Prompt (Start → type cmd → Enter) and run:

ffmpeg -version

You should see something like:

ffmpeg version 7.1-full_build-www.gyan.dev Copyright (c) 2000-2024 the FFmpeg developers
built with gcc 13.2.0 (Rev5, Built by MSYS2 project)
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-static ...

The exact version and the long configuration line will differ — what matters is that it prints a version banner rather than an error. Then check the second program, which the app needs just as much:

ffprobe -version

If either says “‘ffmpeg’ is not recognized as an internal or external command”, work back through: is the path you added the folder that actually contains ffmpeg.exe, did you click OK on all three dialogs, and is this a newly opened prompt?

If it still doesn’t take, restart the machine. A reboot guarantees every program — including the app and Windows Explorer — picks up the new PATH.

Using it with the app

Nothing to configure. Fast Seek and the split feature look for ffmpeg and ffprobe on the PATH each time you use them, so once the check above passes, both features simply start working. If you had the app open while making the change, close and reopen it so it inherits the new PATH.

The bundled libraries the app uses for playback are untouched by any of this — they live in the app’s own folder and are independent of whatever version you install here.