Using a newer version of FFmpeg with Docker.

Introduction

Hello, I needed to use FFmpeg in a node application, however the problem was the default FFmpeg that can be installed with the node image was too old and didn't support what I was trying to do.

There were two ways to handle this either compile FFmpeg from source, which would take a while and I really didn't want to have a long Dockerfile, not to mention the cleanup afterwards.

So I decided to copy the FFmpeg bin from the "jrottenberg/ffmpeg:4.4-alpine" into the Nodejs image. Reason being it's simpler.

---

Using FFmpeg 4.4 with the node image

To use the FFmpeg bin with the node image I changed the head of my Dockerfile like so:

FROM jrottenberg/ffmpeg:4.4-alpine AS FFmpeg
FROM node:16-alpine

COPY --from=FFmpeg / /

With this I was able to use FFmpeg 4.4 with the Node 16 image.
I also learned something new about Docker.

Hopefully this will help me in future projects, and hopefully be of use to you.

Comments

[Alexey Kryazhev]

seems like copying just /usr/local should be enough:
github.com/jrottenberg/ffmpeg/blob...

[Ethan]

I see. Thanks for sharing :)