To use :py:mod:`ffmpegio`, the package must be installed on Python as well as having the FFmpeg binary files at a location :py:mod:`ffmpegio` can find. In addition, optional external packages can be installed to enable the ffmpegio features that interact with them.

Install the :py:mod:`ffmpegio` package via pip.

pip install ffmpegio

There are two platform independent approaches to install FFmpeg for the use in Python:

The installation of FFmpeg is platform dependent. For Ubuntu/Debian Linux,

sudo apt install ffmpeg

and for MacOS,

brew install ffmpeg

no other actions are needed as these commands will place the FFmpeg executables on the system path.

For Windows, it is a bit more complicated.

1. Download pre-built packages from the links available on the FFmpeg's Download page.

2. Unzip the content and place the files in one of the following directories:

   Auto-detectable FFmpeg folder path	Example
   %PROGRAMFILES%\ffmpeg	C:\Program Files\ffmpeg
   %PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\ffmpeg	C:\Program Files (x86)\ffmpeg
   %USERPROFILE%\ffmpeg	C:\Users\john\ffmpeg
   %APPDATA%\ffmpeg	C:\Users\john\AppData\Roaming\ffmpeg
   %APPDATA%\programs\ffmpeg	C:\Users\john\AppData\Roaming\programs\ffmpeg
   %LOCALAPPDATA%\ffmpeg	C:\Users\john\AppData\Local\ffmpeg
   %LOCALAPPDATA%\programs\ffmpeg	C:\Users\john\AppData\Local\programs\ffmpeg

   Keep the internal structure intact, i.e., the executables must be found at ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe and ffmpeg\bin\ffprobe.exe.

   There are two other alternative. First, the FFmpeg binaries could be placed on the Python's current working directory (i.e., os.getcwd()). Second, they could be placed in an arbitrary location and use :py:func:`ffmpegio.set_path` to specify the location. The latter feature is especially useful when ffmpegio is bundled in a package (e.g., PyInstaller).