FFmpeg works on terminal not with PHP exec

Question

If I execute a Ffmpeg command from terminal, I get the desired result:

ffmpeg  -i src.mp4 -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv

Terminal's output:

...
video:3404kB audio:1038kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 2.966904%

And video.flv is created correctly.

Then, if called via PHP exec:

exec("ffmpeg  -i src.mp4 -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv", $o, $v);
var_dump($o);
var_dump($v);

The output is this:

array(0) { } int(1)

And no file is created. Any thoughts on how to approach this?

I can exec('whoami') with no problems and I have used the FFmpeg full path as well: /usr/local/bin/ffmpeg

Answer 1

The problem is that you use exec instead of shell_exec the point is that environement of exec don't know about any FFmpeg executable, but shell_exec* does, becuase it uses env. of the bash/shell

Ths solution is to use the full path to FFmpeg executable, eg. /usr/bin/ffmpeg

Answer 2

add 2>&1 to the end of the command and it will work:

exec("ffmpeg  -i src.mp4 -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x240 video.flv 2>&1", $o, $v);

Answer 3

In addition to using the full path for ffmpeg, use /full/path/to/src.mp4 and /full/path/to/video.flv

Answer 4

I has the same problem, first make sure that the ffmpeg.exe or directory is in the windows path, then restart your apache server to ensure that php found the ffmpeg command. After this i can use ffmpeg with both options exec and shell_exec

Answer 5

In my case, due to using root user to create the folder, the php user didn't have write permission. Giving it write permission worked. For some reason I wasn't getting any output with shell_exec but the following shows everything and finds the ffmpeg binaries for you.

<?php
$dir = __DIR__;

//Find ffmpeg binaries
$ffmpeg =trim(shell_exec("which ffmpeg"));

//resize input.png to 120px width
$command = "$ffmpeg -i '$dir/input.png' -vf scale=120:-1 '$dir/output.png'";
echo $command . "<br>";

//run command and output streams to vars
exec("$command 2>&1", $o, $v);

echo "<pre>";
print_r($o);
print_r($v);
echo "</pre>";