How to fix the ffmpeg not found error with youtube-dl

If youtube-dl tells you ffprobe/avprobe and ffmpeg/avconv not found, the fix is to install ffmpeg. On a Mac, that’s one command: brew install ffmpeg.

Here’s how I ran into it.

I love fan noises while sleeping. My sleep quality totally changed for the better since I started.

I was downloading a fan noise audio track from YouTube to put in the Music app using youtube-dl, like this:

youtube-dl ciD52cwJGCs --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --prefer-ffmpeg

But after downloading the file, I got the error

ERROR: ffprobe/avprobe and ffmpeg/avconv not found. Please install one.

To solve this on my Mac I had to run

brew install ffmpeg

It took a while, then I ran the command again and since the file was already downloaded, it was a quick process to get the mp3.

Why does this happen?

youtube-dl on its own only downloads files. It doesn’t convert anything.

YouTube doesn’t serve plain mp3 files. The audio comes in formats like m4a or webm. When you ask for --extract-audio --audio-format mp3, the tool needs something to do the actual conversion, and that something is ffmpeg, a separate program that handles audio and video processing.

That’s why the download itself succeeded, and the error only showed up at the conversion step. A plain youtube-dl <video-id> without the audio extraction flags would have worked fine, but you’d get a video file, not an mp3.

The error message also mentions ffprobe. That’s a companion tool ffmpeg uses to inspect media files. You don’t need to install it separately: the ffmpeg package includes it.

Installing on other systems

On Ubuntu or Debian:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Once installed, verify it’s available by running:

ffmpeg -version

If that prints version information, youtube-dl will find it too.

Still getting the error after installing?

One thing that can trip you up: ffmpeg must be in your PATH, because youtube-dl looks for it there.

If you installed it some other way, say by downloading a binary into a random folder, the error stays. You can point youtube-dl at the exact location with the --ffmpeg-location flag:

youtube-dl ciD52cwJGCs --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --ffmpeg-location /opt/ffmpeg/bin

With Homebrew you don’t have to worry about this, since brew puts ffmpeg in your PATH automatically.

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