How to get ffmpeg?

[mikeyno (Mike Brennan)]

Hello, I followed the guidelines on how to enable ffmpeg support here: FFmpeg - Home Assistant . I put ‘ffmpeg:’ in my configuration file and restarted but when I drop to a terminal the command isn’t found. I also tried looking until /usr/bin/ffmpeg but it’s not there either.

It looks like someone else had a similar problem awhile back: Cannot get ffmpeg running , but I’d rather not install MotionEye since I really only need ffmpeg. I’m trying to follow this guide Smart Baby Monitor - Home Assistant . What’s odd is if I disable the ‘output’ key in the binary sensor mentioned in that blog article, then it seems like the sensor works sometimes, which implies the ffmpeg_noise platform seems to be working. In that case wouldn’t ffmpeg support be working as well?

I don’t see anything in the logs about ffmpeg. I’m not sure how to debug this, any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

[CentralCommand (Mike)]

@mikeyno

when I drop to a terminal the command isn’t found

What does this mean? Do you mean you ssh’ed in using one of the ssh addons? If so then this makes sense, those are entirely different docker containers from Home Assistant and ffmpeg was not installed there. It was installed in the home assistant container.

If you need terminal access to ffmpeg in order to try things out then you should install it somewhere that you have terminal access. Either on another machine or in the ssh addon by adding ffmpeg to the list of packages to install in the addon config (or by doing apk add ffmpeg while SSH’ed).

But just always keep in mind the ssh addon runs in a completely different container and environment then HA. Commands that work in it don’t necessarily work in HA and vice versa. I wrote this guide to help people understand this and deal with some of the common issues that causes (like when trying to have HA ssh somewhere):

SSH'ing from a command line sensor or shell command

I’ve noticed there’s a significant number of posts looking for help on this topic and the posters all seem to struggle with a few common issues. I realized I’ve been almost copying and pasting my responses on these topics so it seemed like a good case for a community guide. What will this cover This guide will walk through the process of getting a command which ssh’s into another machine to get some simple data ready to be included in a command line sensor. To keep it simple I’ll use the same …

[mikeyno (Mike Brennan)]

Thanks @CentralCommand . I’ve been using the SSH & Web Terminal addon to get an SSH shell. So I’m guessing ffmpeg support is enabled but there is something else going wrong with trying to connect to the icecast server.

Thanks for explaining this to me. Since the problem is likely more to do with connecting to my icecast server and not with ffmpeg, I’ve continued this discussion on the blog post discussion thread here: Smart Baby Monitor - #54 by velkrosmaak

[jsquader (Jon)]

@mikeyno, did you ever figure this out? Looking to implement something similar myself.

[mikeyno (Mike Brennan)]

Sadly no, I couldn’t devote any more time to it. If you figure it out I’d love to know!