Node fluent-ffmpeg stream output error code 1

Question

Following the documentation exactly, I'm attempting to use a stream to write a video conversion to file.

var FFmpeg = require('fluent-ffmpeg');
var fs = require('fs');

var outStream = fs.createWriteStream('C:/Users/Jack/Videos/test.mp4');

new FFmpeg({ source: 'C:/Users/Jack/Videos/video.mp4' })
    .withVideoCodec('libx264')
    .withAudioCodec('libmp3lame')
    .withSize('320x240')
    .on('error', function(err) {
        console.log('An error occurred: ' + err.message);
    })
    .on('end', function() {
        console.log('Processing finished !');
    })
    .writeToStream(outStream, { end: true });

This conversion works perfectly when I use .saveToFile(), but returns

An error occurred: ffmpeg exited with code 1

When I run this code. I'm on Windows 8.1 64 bit using a 64 bit ffmpeg build from here.

Answer 1

I had the same problem today (and on the same platform too)

It's like when you stream you have to specify a format but you cannot specify mp4 because it's not valid

I ended up with this, I think it's a good workaround and I hope it helps:

var input_file = fs.createReadStream(path);
input_file.on('error', function(err) {
    console.log(err);
});

var output_path = 'tmp/output.mp4';
var output_stream = fs.createWriteStream('tmp/output.mp4');

var ffmpeg = child_process.spawn('ffmpeg', ['-i', 'pipe:0', '-f', 'mp4', '-movflags', 'frag_keyframe', 'pipe:1']);
input_file.pipe(ffmpeg.stdin);
ffmpeg.stdout.pipe(output_stream);

ffmpeg.stderr.on('data', function (data) {
    console.log(data.toString());
});

ffmpeg.stderr.on('end', function () {
    console.log('file has been converted succesfully');
});

ffmpeg.stderr.on('exit', function () {
    console.log('child process exited');
});

ffmpeg.stderr.on('close', function() {
    console.log('...closing time! bye');
});

Answer 2

I had same problem on Debian. Problem was, that there was only avconv with ffmpeg fallback, but the library fluent-ffmpeg called ffmpeg -encoders, which ended with "Missing argument for option '-encoders'". Avconv has avconv -codecs only.

So installing proper ffmpeg package should help.

(or change flunt-ffmpeg library code to call not -encoders but -codecs, output format is slightly different)

PS.: same script was doing great job on windows

Answer 3

Try updating ffmpeg on your machine. I had 2.8 and I got the same error. It works fine after updating to 3.0.