ffmpeg

ffmpeg is the media toolkit yt-dlp uses to combine separate video and audio streams. You usually do not need to call it directly, but it must be installed and visible on your PATH.

Windows

Install a current build with winget:

winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

Alternatively, download a build linked from the official ffmpeg download page. Extract it to a permanent location, then add the archive's bin directory to your user PATH—not ffmpeg.exe itself. Open a new terminal afterward.

macOS

With Homebrew:

brew install ffmpeg

Linux

Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux Mint:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ffmpeg

Fedora:

sudo dnf install ffmpeg

Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S ffmpeg

Package availability and codec selection vary by distribution. Consult your distribution documentation if the package is unavailable.

Verify the installation

ffmpeg -version
ffprobe -version

Both commands should print version and build information.

Containers and remuxing

The video codec, audio codec, and file container are different things. The highest-quality streams may combine cleanly into Matroska (.mkv) but not MP4. For preservation, keep the source codecs and let yt-dlp choose a compatible container. If you need an MP4 playback copy, try:

ffmpeg -i "archive.mkv" -map 0 -c copy "playback-copy.mp4"

This remuxes without re-encoding. It can fail when one of the source codecs is not supported by MP4; keep the original archive either way.