Installation

Using binary wheels

On windows 7+ (64 or 32 bit) and linux (64 bit), ffpyplayer wheels can be installed for python 3.5+ using:

pip install ffpyplayer

Warning

Although the ffpyplayer source code is licensed under the LGPL, the ffpyplayer wheels on PYPI are distributed under the GPL because the FFmpeg binaries are GPL’d. For LGPL builds you can compile FFmpeg yourself using LGPL options.

For other OSs or to compile with master see below.

Compiling

Requirements

To compile ffpyplayer we need:

Cython (pip install --upgrade cython~=3.0.11).

A c compiler e.g. gcc or MSVC.

SDL2 or SDL1.2 (SDL1.2 is not recommended). See compille for how to get it.

SDL2_mixer If wanting to play multiple audio files simultaneously (USE_SDL2_MIXER must be set). See compille for how to get it.

A recent (2.x+, has been tested with 2.8) FFmpeg compiled with --enable-shared. See compille for how to get it.

Compiling ffpyplayer

Download or compile FFMpeg and SDL2 as shown below and set the appropriate environment variables as needed.
Install Cython with e.g.:
```
pip install --upgrade cython~=3.0.11
```
You can select the FFmpeg libraries to be used by defining values for CONFIG_XXX. For example, CONFIG_AVFILTER=0 will disable inclusion of the FFmpeg avfilter libraries. See setup.py for all the available flags.
To use SDL2_mixer, which is required when multiple audio files are to be played simultaneously (or even when they are open at the same time) environment variable USE_SDL2_MIXER must be set to 1 when compiling. SDL2_mixer binaries and headers must also be available.
Finally, run:
```
pip install ffpyplayer
```
Or to install master, do:
```
pip install https://github.com/matham/ffpyplayer/archive/master.zip
```
If you have a local directory with the ffpyplayer source code. To compile, you can run within that directory * make on linux, or * python setup.py build_ext --inplace, or * pip install -e . to also properly install it.

You should now be able to import ffpyplayer with import ffpyplayer.

SDL and Compiling FFmpeg

To use ffpyplayer, the compiled FFmpeg and SDL shared libraries must be available. Following are instructions for the various OSs.

Windows

You can get pre-compiled FFmpeg libaries from http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/. You need both the shared (which contains the .a files and headers) and the dev (which contains the dlls) downloads.

You can download SDL2 from https://www.libsdl.org/release/. 2.0.4 is the most recent version.

You can download SDL2_mixer from https://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer/. 2.0.1 is the most recent version.

If there’s a root directory containing a include and lib directory, each containing the header and compiled binaries, respectively, then FFMPEG_ROOT and SDL_ROOT can be set to these root directories for ffmpeg and sdl, respectively. Otherwise,
SDL_LIB_DIR and FFMPEG_LIB_DIR should point to a folder which contains the SDL and FFmpeg compiled shared libraries (*.dll), respectively.
FFMPEG_INCLUDE_DIR should point to a directory which contains the FFmpeg header files.
SDL_INCLUDE_DIR should point to a directory containg the SDL headers. For SDL2, this directory contains a SDL2 named directory with all the headers.

In addition, directories containing the SDL and FFmpeg shared libraries (*.dll) need to be added to the PATH.

OSX

You can get both FFmpeg and SDL2 using brew. You can install them using:

brew update
brew install sdl2 sdl2_mixer ffmpeg

Otherwise, follow the Linux instructions.

Linux

Ubuntu 18.04

On Ubuntu 18.04, the following command will install the python, ffmpeg, and sdl2 dependencies:

sudo apt install ffmpeg libavcodec-dev libavdevice-dev libavfilter-dev libavformat-dev \
libavutil-dev libswscale-dev libswresample-dev libpostproc-dev libsdl2-dev libsdl2-2.0-0 \
libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0 libsdl2-mixer-dev python3-dev

Other Linux platforms

FFMpeg

Follow the instructions at https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/CompilationGuide/Ubuntu to compile FFMpeg. However, those instructions detail how to build the static version. We need the shared version. This means that --enable-shared and --extra-cflags="-fPIC" need to be added when compiling FFmpeg AND its dependencies. And if present, --disable-shared or --enable-static must be removed.

Following that guide, export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/ffmpeg_build/lib also needs to be executed for the compiled binaries to be found.

SDL2

SDL2 can usually be gotten from the package manager, e.g. in Ubuntu 16.04 you can do the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install libsdl2-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev

Python Headers

The Python headers are required for compilation, on Ubuntu you can get it with:

sudo apt-get install python3-dev

For either ffmpeg or sdl2 if manually compiled, PKG_CONFIG_PATH will need to be set to the path containing the generated *.pc files and pkg-config will need to be available. Otherwise, if installed to a non-standard location, the paths to the compiled shared libraries and headers will need to be set with

If there’s a root directory containing a include and lib directory, each containing the header and compiled binaries, respectively, then FFMPEG_ROOT and SDL_ROOT can be set to these root directories for ffmpeg and sdl, respectively. Otherwise,
SDL_LIB_DIR and FFMPEG_LIB_DIR should point to a folder which contains the SDL and FFmpeg compiled shared libraries (*.so), respectively.
FFMPEG_INCLUDE_DIR should point to a directory which contains the FFmpeg header files.
SDL_INCLUDE_DIR should point to a directory containg the SDL headers. For SDL2, this directory contains a SDL2 named directory with all the headers.

In addition, directories containing the SDL and FFmpeg shared libraries (*.so) need to be added to the PATH.

You can find a complete minimal example of compiling ffpyplayer on Ubuntu here. A more complete example used to build the wheels is here.