ffprobe or avprobe not found. Please install one

Question

Make sure you have the last version for youtube-dl

sudo youtube-dl -U

after that you can solve this problem by installing the missing ffmpeg on ubuntu and debian:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

and macOS use the command:

brew install ffmpeg

brew install ffmpeg will install what you need and all the dependencies if you are on a Mac.

I know the user asked this for Linux, but I had this issue in Windows (10 64bits) and found little information, so this is how I solved it:

• Download LIBAV, I used libav-11.3-win64.7z. Just copy "avprobe.exe" and all DLLs from "/win64/usr/bin" to where "youtube-dl.exe" is.

In case LIBAV does not help, try with FFMPEG, copying the contents of the "bin" folder to where "youtube-dl.exe" is. That did not help me, but others said it did, so it may worth a try.

Hope this helps someone having the issue in Windows.

On Windows, you can easily install ffmpeg via chocolatey

choco install ffmpeg

There is some confusion when using pip install in Windows. The instructions talk about a specific folder which has youtube-dl.exe. There is no such folder if you use pip install.

The solution is to:

• Download one of the builds from https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/
• Extract the zip contents
• Place the contents of the bin folder (there are three exe files) in any folder which is a path in Windows. I personally use Ananconda, so I placed them in /Anaconda/Scripts, but you could place it in any folder and add that folder to the path.