There are a few reasons why this error may be appearing. First, check to make sure that you are in the correct directory. It can be easy to lose track of where your files are actually stored, especially on a personal computer. If you are working on a personal computer, the easiest way to do this is to check where your files are. When working with macOS, for example, files are often stored in the downloads or documents folders. To change your directory from home to this specific directory, use the command cd followed by your desired folder. For a folder named downloads, it would look like this: cd downloads
There are a few reasons why this error may be appearing. First, check to make sure that you are in the correct directory. It can be easy to lose track of where your files are actually stored, especially on a personal computer. If you are working on a personal computer, the easiest way to do this is to check where your files are. When working with macOS, for example, files are often stored in the Downloads or Documents folders. To change your directory from home to this specific directory, use the command cd followed by your desired folder. For a folder named Downloads, it would look like this: cd $HOME/Downloads
After you have ensured that you are in the correct directory, and the error is still occurring, check that your argument is formatted correctly. If you are copying and pasting from a separate document or ffmprovisr directly, there may be typos or missing spaces.
If the error message includes other parts of the command, such as a flag, that indicates where your typo or missing space may be, as in this example, where the -c flag has not been separated from the file name:
When using filters, there are a handful of errors that may pop up. While this section certainly does not cover them all, below you will find a couple of possible errors and what could be causing them.
This error often comes from a mistake in the formatting of the command. If you are trying to use certain filters, such as “hflip,vflip,” make sure that you remove the quotation marks, as they are not part of the filter argument. This is not always the case, as quotation marks are used with filtergraphs to indicate the beginning and end of a filtergraph. Forgetting to remove the quotation marks on certain filters may prompt FFmpeg to run the command as a filtergraph, resulting in an error message like this one:
+This error often comes from a mistake in the formatting of the command. If you are trying to use certain filters, such as “hflip,vflip,” you may need to remove the quotation marks, as they are not mandatory for certain filter arguments. This is not always the case, as quotation marks are used with filtergraphs to indicate the beginning and end of a filtergraph. Forgetting to remove the quotation marks on certain filters may prompt FFmpeg to run the command as a filtergraph, resulting in an error message like this one:
To avoid this error, check whether the filter you are using requires quotation marks or not. Similar to other errors, oftentimes writing out the entire command, rather than copying and pasting, is beneficial to check for these formatting errors.
Also between the two example errors above, there is one difference that can be helpful to pinpoint when trying to troubleshoot. For the first error, “option not found” refers to the use of quotation marks in a filter that did not require them, thus making the command an unidentifiable option to FFmpeg and making it impossible to differentiate between certain flags in the argument. For the second error, “filter not found” also refers to the use of quotation marks in a command that did not require them, but this time FFmpeg read the argument as a filtergraph due to the quotation marks. For more information regarding filtergraphs, check out the filtergraph section.