Importing Streams not working

[thefran1412]

Version information

• fluent-ffmpeg version: 2.1.2
• ffmpeg version: 20200122 & 20181217
• OS: Windows 10

Code to reproduce

If I run the following code it throws an error, but if instead I change the createReadStream for the path directly it works just fine. I need to use an input stream for my application and I can't figure out why it's not working. Thanks in advance 😄

const inputPath = path.resolve('/path/to/resource/file.gif')
const outputPath = path.resolve('/path/to/output/file.webm')

ffmpeg(fs.createReadStream(path))
   .inputFormat('gif')
   .videoCodec('libvpx-vp9')
   .format('webm')
   .output(outputPath)
   .run()

This is the ffmpeg command generated:

ffmpeg -f gif -i pipe:0 -y -vcodec libvpx-vp9 -f webm /absolute/path/to/output/file.webm

Expected results

Processing the file correctly

Observed results

Throws following error:

Error: ffmpeg exited with code 1: pipe:0: I/O error

[poppinlp]

Seems I got the same error when I try to use a stream as input or use a stream for output. But will work fine after I change the stream to file path.

[nastari]

SAME

[nastari]

someone solved?

[federicocarboni]

This is mentioned nowhere in the FFmpeg Docs, but to use a streaming gif you have to set the input format as gif_pipe. @poppinlp @nastari @thefran1412

[nbusser]

Hey @federicocarboni . Good insight. It works now with ffprobe CLI but it still fails with fluent-ffmpeg.

const ffmpeg = require('fluent-ffmpeg');
const fs = require('fs');

const file = fs.createReadStream('gif');
ffmpeg(file).inputFormat('gif_pipe').ffprobe((err, data) => {
  console.log(data, err)
})

[nbusser]

Hey @federicocarboni . Good insight. It works now with ffprobe CLI but it still fails with fluent-ffmpeg.

const ffmpeg = require('fluent-ffmpeg');
const fs = require('fs');

const file = fs.createReadStream('gif');
ffmpeg(file).inputFormat('gif_pipe').ffprobe((err, data) => {
  console.log(data, err)
})

Why is this not working ?

Actually, fluent-ffmpeg, when using ffprobe, ignores all the arguments given to ffmpeg command. I suppose the reason behind that is that ffprobe binding was initially a separate project that has been merged with fluent-ffmpeg.

Ugly workaround

By looking at ffprobecode's, it appears that you can provide an options argument that will be concatenated to the command.
You just have to prove -f gif_pipe to ffprobe by setting ["-f", "gif_pipe"] as options array.

Thus you can simply do:

const ffmpeg = require("fluent-ffmpeg");
const fs = require("fs");

const file = fs.createReadStream("nyan-gif");
ffmpeg(file).ffprobe(["-f", "gif_pipe"], (err, data) => {
  console.log(data, err);
});

[slax57]

I had a very similar error message with the same use-case (using Ubuntu, not sure if that's the source of the difference or not):

ffmpeg exited with code 1: pipe:0: Input/output error

And @federicocarboni 's solution to add .inputFormat('gif_pipe') fixed it!
Thank you so much!

---

EDIT: actually it does not 🙁 . When processing multiple files with this, the error is no longer thrown but the resulting files are corrupted (not all of them but most of them).

[shtse8]

I have the same issue, work well with filename but failed with stream.

Spawned Ffmpeg with command: ffmpeg -i pipe:0 -y tests/output.webm
An error occurred: ffmpeg exited with code 1: pipe:0: Invalid data found when processing input
Cannot determine format of input stream 0:0 after EOF
Error marking filters as finished
Conversion failed!

[federicocarboni]

@shtse8 What's the original format? e.g. what are you converting from? .mp4?

For example MP4 does not support streaming along with many other formats.

[shtse8]

@shtse8 What's the original format? e.g. what are you converting from? .mp4?

For example MP4 does not support streaming along with many other formats.

@federicocarboni The original format I was working with is indeed MP4. Thanks for pointing out that MP4 doesn't support streaming, along with several other formats. Appreciate the clarification.