FFmpeg

YUView now has support for FFmpeg to open virtually any container format and decode any video bitstream. Just open a supported container or raw coded bitstream and YUView will try to open it using FFmpeg.

Specify the location of the FFmpeg libraries

YUView will load the following libraries: avcodec, avformat, avutil and swresample. YUView will look for them in the following directories in this order:

1. The directory that was set in "File" -> "Settings"
2. The subdirectory "ffmpeg" in the place where the YUView executable is located.
3. The system directories

Specify custom ffmpeg libraries to use

• Go to "File" -> "Settings" -> "Decoders"
• In the "Specific FFmpeg Libraries" section click on the open button
• Navigate to the path that the ffmpeg libraries are located in and select the four files avcodec, avformat, avutil, swresample. Depending on you platform these might have the extension dll, dylib or so
• YUView will check if the libraries are compatible and are working as expected. If everything is good, the foud libraries should be shown in the the settings dialog and they should be ready to use.

Install FFmpeg

If you don't already have FFmpeg installed, don't panic, thats easy.

Windows

The easiest way to get FFmpeg on windows is to download a precompiled shared version which is not statically linked (in a staic link you only have one big .exe file. What we need are the individual FFmpeg libraries as .dll). There are two sources linked on the FFmpeg page which both work:

• Gyan FFmpeg build: There is one version (ffmpeg-release-full-shared) which has shared linking
• BtnB FFmpeg Builds: This is an automatic script which builds the latest ffmpeg branches in Github Actions and hosts them on Github. If you are not looking for a specific version just get the latest one from here. Also the latest version is built here. The important part to look for is the word shared. If you don't know what this all means use the version win64-gpl-shared.

Unzip the archive and place the libraries in one of the paths that YUView will check (see above). Alternatively, unzip them into a folder somewhere and select the path to the libraries in "File" -> "Settings" -> "Decoders".

Linux

On linux it depends on the distribution that you use but all major distributions should come with precompiled packages that you can just install. Here are some examples:

# On Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
# On archlinux
sudo pacman -S ffmpeg  

Mac

On MacOS, it is easiest to install FFmpeg using homebrew:

# Install homebrew (only required if homebrew is not yet installed)
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
# Install ffmpeg
brew install ffmpeg