Installing Ffmpeg Binary In Windows

August 11th, 2009 § 9 comments


  1. Get the latest build from the arrozcru autobuilds page
  2. Unzip the folder into C:/Program Files/ffmpeg
  3. Add C:/Program Files/ffmpeg/bin to your system’s PATH environment variable

Optional libx264 preset setup:

If you use libx264 presets (by using the -vpre flag) you need to do the following setup.

  1. Create a HOME environment variable for your user pointing to your home directory. (e.g. for Vista C:/Users/moose or for XP C:/Documents and Settings/moose )
  2. Create a .ffmpeg folder in your home directory
  3. Copy the preset files from C:/Program Files/ffmpeg/share/*.ffpreset into %HOME%/.ffmpeg
  4. Now you can open a command prompt and use ffmpeg. :D (e.g. This is my Vimeo video conversion command. ffmpeg -i -vcodec libx264 -vpre hq -crf 24 -g 25 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 192k -ar 44100 output.mp4 )

*note: libfaac is not included in the build since libfaac is considered to be a non-free plugin. :(


Update: ffmpeg has gone through some changes.  use -preset instead of -vpre.  Also, the hq preset is no longer available.  Available presets are: ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow and placebo.

Also, the ffmpeg binary is deprecated, use avconv instead (mostly compatible with the same options)

avconv -i -vcodec libx264 -preset slow -crf 24 -g 25 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 192k -ar 44100 output.mp4

  • Gonzo Bumm

    THANKS MAN for the HOME hint – that was exactky what I was looking for and could not find – where did you get this?
    One addition that might be important: use -threads 0 to utilize all cores in your processor :)

  • hung

    Thanks very much. I didn’t know how to create environment variables but now I can do it.

  • http://noexist caio

    md c:\users\caio\.ffmpeg
    set HOME=c:\ffmpeg

  • Iqbalsingh

    Really help me!!!


  • Brad

    How do I use ffmpeg to conver the videos for HTML 5 .mp4, .ogg, .webm? This is the command I am trying to use “ffmpeg -i INPUTFILE.mp4 -b 1500k -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -crf baseline -g 30 -s 640×360 OUTPUTFILE.mp4″ but get error “File for preset ‘slow’ not found”. Also how do you setup system’s PATH environment variables and Create a HOME environment variable?

  • Anonymous

    Here’s instructions for the Windows XP environment variables or Vista/7

    You should already have a PATH environment variable, but probably need to create the HOME one.

  • Damian

    “Add C:/Program Files/ffmpeg/bin to your system’s PATH
    environment variable”
    is as inconclusive for me as

    please provide a template i.e. Variable/Value!


  • Edwin Bradford

    A good guide but on a 64 bit OS these instructions apply to a 64 bit install of Ffmpeg. I finally figured out that was why I couldn’t get it to open my Avisynth files (64 bit Avisynth is still experimental and 32bit is recommended).  If you download and unzip the 32 bit stable Ffmpeg to “C:Program Files (x86)ffmpeg” then Avisynth works as expected. The path variable must also then be “C:Program Files (x86)ffmpegbin”.

    You can test it with “ffplay myfile.avs”.  Incidentally I believe all the forward slashes in this article should be backslashes on Windows. @ciao has it correct.

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