home-assistant.io/source/_components/ffmpeg.markdown

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layout	title	description	date	sidebar	comments	sharing	footer	logo	ha_category
page	FFmpeg	Instructions for how to integrate FFmpeg within Home Assistant.	2016-09-14 00:00	true	false	true	true	ffmpeg.png	Hub

The FFmpeg component allows other Home Assistant components to process video and audio streams. This component supports all FFmpeg versions since 3.0.0; if you have a older version, please update.

You need the `ffmpeg` binary in your system path. On Debian 8 or Raspbian (Jessie) you can install it from [debian-backports](https://backports.debian.org/Instructions/). If you want [hardware acceleration](https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/HWAccelIntro) support on a Raspberry Pi, you will need to build from source by yourself. Windows binaries are avilable on the [FFmpeg](http://www.ffmpeg.org/) website.

To set it up, add the following information to your configuration.yaml file:

ffmpeg:

Configuration variables:

• ffmpeg_bin (Optional): Default 'ffmpeg'. The name or path to the ffmpeg binary.
• run_test (Optional): Default True. Check if input is usable by ffmpeg.

{% linkable_title Troubleshooting %}

In most cases, ffmpeg automatically detects all needed options to read a video or audio stream or file. But it is possible in rare cases that you will need to set options to help ffmpeg out.

First check that your stream is playable by ffmpeg outside of Home Assistant with (use option -an or -vn to disable video or audio stream):

$ ffmpeg -i INPUT -an -f null -

Now you should be able to see what is going wrong. The following list contains some common problems and solutions:

• [rtsp @ ...] UDP timeout, retrying with TCP: You need to set an RTSP transport in the configuration with: input: -rtsp_transport tcp -i INPUT
• [rtsp @ ...] Could not find codec parameters for stream 0 (Video: ..., none): unspecified size: FFmpeg needs more data or time for autodetection (the default is 5 seconds). You can set the analyzeduration and/or probesize options to experiment with giving FFmpeg more leeway. If you find the needed value, you can set it with: input: -analyzeduration xy -probesize xy -i INPUT. More information about this can be found here.