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I'm trying to convert some .png files I have into a movie using ffmpeg. I'm using the tutorial:

http://www.miscdebris.net/blog/2008/04/28/create-a-movie-file-from-single-image-files-png-jpegs/

The files have names Image001.png, Image002.png, ..., Image500.png, and Image501.png. I manually installed ffmpeg this morning from their website, so I don't have to do step 1. I then proceed to run:

cd Downloads
cd python-meep
cd Images

Where both my images and my folder containing the manually downloaded ffmpeg are located. Next, I type:

ffmpeg -qscale 5 -r 20 -b 9600 -i Image%03d.png movie.mp4

To my surprise, this is the error message I get:

ffmpeg: command not found

What's going on here? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!

P.S. Could be relevant that I'm using Ubuntu 14.04.

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  • Use ./ffmpeg -i Image%03d.png -c:v mpeg4 -qscale:v 5 -r 20 -b:v 9600k movie.mp4 — see the linked question for an explanation of the path. But more importantly, you need to put the encoder options after the -i part, and you should tell ffmpeg which encoder you want. qscale is valid for MPEG-4 Part 2, but perhaps you want H.264 instead? Use ffmpeg -i Image%03d.png -pix_fmt yuv420p -c:v libx264 -crf 23 movie.mp4 instead then, and see trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264 as well as trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/…
    – slhck
    Oct 21, 2014 at 18:28
  • Oh, and probably not a good idea to use a six year old tutorial for ffmpeg—quite a few things have changed since then. It's not your fault, but there's still a ton of bad information out there. Good that you downloaded a newest version from the website, though. Feel free to ask a new question if you have troubles with the conversion.
    – slhck
    Oct 21, 2014 at 18:32

1 Answer 1

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You either need to supply the full path or the program must be in the search path.

In your case you do not have your current directory (.) in the search path.
Note that this is a good thing. Putting . in your search path allows unwanted things like browsing my homedir and typing 'ls'. (guess which ls will be executed. It is not /bin/ls).

So, supply the path oruse ./ffmpeg (the dot stands for the current directory. So dot slash file means 'that file in this directory'.

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