Installation

Installation is done with pip. If you don’t have pip, take a look at how to install it.

With pip installed, just type this in a terminal:

$ (sudo) pip install moviepy

Installation of additional binaries

MoviePy depends on the software ffmpeg for video reading and writing and on ffplay for video previewing.

You don’t need to worry about ffmpeg, as it should be automatically downloaded/installed by ImageIO during your first use of MoviePy (it takes a few seconds).

You do need to worry about ffplay if you plan on using video/audio previewing. For these cases, make sure to have ffplay installed (it can usually be found alongside ffmpeg) and make sure it is accessible to Python, or define a custom path (see below).

Define custom paths to binaries

If you want to use a specific version of FFmpeg and FFplay, you can do so using environment variables.

There are a couple of environment variables used by MoviePy that allow you to configure custom paths to the external tools.

To setup any of these variables, the easiest way is to do it in Python before importing objects from MoviePy. For example:

import os
os.environ["FFMPEG_BINARY"] = "/path/to/custom/ffmpeg"
os.environ["FFPLAY_BINARY"] = "/path/to/custom/ffplay"

Alternatively, after installing the optional dependencies, you can create a .env file in your working directory that will be automatically read. For example

FFMPEG_BINARY=/path/to/custom/ffmpeg
FFPLAY_BINARY=/path/to/custom/ffplay

Environment variables

There are 2 available environment variables for external binaries :

FFMPEG_BINARY

Normally you can leave it to its default (‘ffmpeg-imageio’) in which case imageio will download the right ffmpeg binary (on first use) and then always use that binary.

The second option is "auto-detect". In this case ffmpeg will be whatever binary is found on the computer: generally ffmpeg (on Linux/macOS) or ffmpeg.exe (on Windows).

Lastly, you can set it to use a binary at a specific location on your disk by specifying the exact path.

FFPLAY_BINARY

The default is "auto-detect". MoviePy will try to find and use the installed ffplay binary.

You can set it to use a binary at a specific location on your disk. On Windows, this might look like:

os.environ["FFPLAY_BINARY"] = r"C:\Program Files\ffmpeg\ffplay.exe"

Verify if MoviePy find binaries

To test if FFmpeg and FFplay are found by MoviePy, in a Python console, you can run :

from moviepy.config import check
check()