ffplay command not found

In this troubleshooting guide we learn how to fix ffplay command not found error message

Introduction

When you run more command in linux terminal / console, you get the following error message

ffplay: command not found

or when using sudo you get the following error message

sudo: ffplay: command not found

Solutions to ffplay: command not found

How To Fix ffplay: command not found in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux / Raspbian

In Ubuntu ffplay is provided by ffmpeg package.

ffmpeg is:

FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge.

This package contains:

  • ffmpeg: a command line tool to convert multimedia files between formats
  • ffplay: a simple media player based on SDL and the FFmpeg libraries
  • ffprobe: a simple multimedia stream analyzer
  • qt-faststart: a utility to rearrange Quicktime files

To fix this problem, we can install more using the command below.

sudo apt-get -y install ffmpeg

This command might take some time to finish depending on your machine internet connection.

You can also use apt command to install ffmpeg.

sudo apt -y install ffmpeg

Or if you have aptitude installed you can use the following command.

sudo aptitude install ffmpeg

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to fix ffplay command not found error in Ubuntu / Debian / Kali Linux or Raspbian distribution.