1mo ago

ffmpeg from apt or flatpak, do I need both? debian 13.0

flatpak should be newer than apt, correct if wrong.

I first installed FFmpeg extension with extra codecs from flatpak, executed a ffmpeg command that returned: command not found.

I then thought the flatpak package, as the name states, is an extension that needs the apt version to be installed to work, so I executed sudo apt install ffmpeg and after downloading, the command worked.

Should I get rid of flatpak's ffmpeg? Am I gaining functions with this package?

5 comments

The ffmpeg from Flathub is a "runtime" package, intended to be used by other flatpak apps. It's not meant for CLI use.
Flatpak apps are not added to your $PATH. They're run with flatpak run appID. Though again, ffmpeg is not an app so it cannot be run this way. Though technically you could use it for CLI use by doing something like flatpak run --command=sh org.mozilla.firefox. This will open a shell inside the flatpak environment, which can use the ffmpeg flatpak runtime.
Though now that I think about it, it would be fun to create my own flatpak package for ffmpeg for CLI use. Should be pretty simple, it would just be a mostly empty package that relies on the ffmpeg-full flatpak runtime. Edit: and I did
The manifest is simply

id: my.custom.ffmpeg runtime: org.freedesktop.Platform runtime-version: '24.08' sdk: org.freedesktop.Sdk add-extensions: org.freedesktop.Platform.ffmpeg-full: directory: lib/ffmpeg version: '24.08' add-ld-path: . command: ffmpeg modules: - name: ffmpeg-wrapper buildsystem: simple build-commands: - mkdir -p /app/lib/ffmpeg - install -Dm755 ffmpeg.sh /app/bin/ffmpeg sources: - type: script dest-filename: ffmpeg.sh commands: - /usr/bin/ffmpeg "$@" finish-args: - --filesystem=host
- holy crap you're fast
You cannot run flatpak application by simply calling the binary.
Coming to your question, I suggest you to install ffmpeg directly from your Debian repo, this way you can get hardware acceleration or device specific benefits for encoding/decoding/transcoding.
You can keep the flatpak version if it is needed by some other flatpak applications. Normally one won't interfere with the other.
Unless you have a reason for the flatpak, just use the deb from the repo.
Other parts of your system very likely require the apt ffmpeg. Keep it, or at least note the packages that apt wants to uninstall because they depend on ffmpeg