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How can I pipe output of ffmpeg to ffplay?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 2026159490 views
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Problem

How can I pipe the output of ffmpeg to ffplay? At the moment I use a workaround in bash :

Error Output

mkfifo spam
(ffplay spam 2> /dev/null &) ; capture /dev/stdout | ffmpeg -i - spam

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Fix for: How can I pipe output of ffmpeg to ffplay?

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will work; you need to set a container format for the output. This is normally set with ffmpeg looking at the extension you give the output, but here you have to set it manually with . I recommend matroska (MKV) because it can contain almost any vid…

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