ffmpeg & codecs

ffmpeg is optional. It only affects which video formats you can export.

What works without it

Without ffmpeg	Additionally, with ffmpeg
PNG sequence	MP4 (H.264 + AAC)
JPEG sequence	WebM (VP9 + Opus)
Still frame (PNG)	GIF
Lottie (JSON)	MOV (ProRes 4444)
Project (JSON)

The browser build is a special case: it can encode WebM through WebCodecs without ffmpeg, muxed by a small built-in Matroska muxer.

Video export tells you plainly when ffmpeg is missing. It does not fail vaguely, and it does not write a broken file.

Where it is looked for

In this order:

$FFMPEG_PATH, if set and pointing at the executable.
<app resources>/ffmpeg/ffmpeg[.exe], if it was bundled with the build.
ffmpeg on your PATH.

Installing it

Windows


winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

Or download a static build, unzip it, and add its bin folder to your PATH.

macOS


brew install ffmpeg

Linux


sudo apt install ffmpeg

Verify:


ffmpeg -version

Pointing at a specific build

If you have several, or one in a non-standard place:


export FFMPEG_PATH=/path/to/ffmpeg

That takes priority over everything else.

Bundling it into your own build

electron-builder.yml


extraResources:
  - from: <path-to-folder-containing>/ffmpeg   # ffmpeg or ffmpeg.exe
    to: ffmpeg

The Electron main process checks <resources>/ffmpeg before falling back to PATH.

ffmpeg’s own licence terms travel with the binary — LGPL or GPL depending on which build you bundle. That is your obligation to satisfy if you distribute it, not Premation’s.

Why a child process

On the desktop, frames are written to a temp directory and ffmpeg encodes the sequence in a child process. Two things follow:

The encode never competes with the editor’s UI thread or GPU context, so a long export leaves the app usable.
Peak memory is one frame. The finished file is moved into place, so a multi-gigabyte export never passes through the app’s memory.