Query about ffmpeg 8

[Bo Berglund]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2025 19:42:26 +0800, Bret Busby <bret at busby.net> wrote:

>As a hearing impaired person, this is important to me, and yt-dlp now 
>returns an error from youtube, that apparently now, persistently blocks 
>downloading of subtitle files;

You might have a too old version of yt-dlp on your system.
And the system maintaineer does not update the version to what you need....

I ran into that numerous times until I decided to get the yt-dlp files directly
from the developer site.
This is from my notes how I did it:

---------------------------
The best way to get the latest version of yt-dlp is to download it directly from
GitHub as follows:
Link: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases

Select the proper platform to download and use wget to retrieve it:
Example for Linux (Ubuntu) on AMD/Intel CPU:
wget https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2025.06.09/yt-dlp_linux

The file will be named yt-dlp_linux and you need to set its execution flag
before use:
chmod +x yt-dlp_linux

It can be symlinked to the user's bin dir:

ln -sf $HOME/projects/ytdlp/yt-dlp_linux $HOME/bin/yt-dlp

Then it will be used instead of the apt installed version so the most recent is
available.
You will need to regularly update it manually of course but you will not be
limited to the distribution release schedule.
----------------------------

I am not 100% susre about ffmpeg, but my notes on how to get the latest version
of ffmpeg say:

--------------------
A) Uninstall ffmpeg (if it has already been installed)

sudo apt remove ffmpeg

B) Then install:

sudo apt update
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jonathonf/ffmpeg-4
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ffmpeg

C) Check version:

$ ffmpeg -version -hide_banner
ffmpeg version 4.3-2~18.04.york0 Copyright (c) 2000-2020 the FFmpeg developers

New versions will be available via the command:
sudo apt install ffmpeg 
--------------------

These notes were created when I was setting up my system for automatic video
retrieval using ffmpg and/or yt-dlp.

I would first try *only* yt-dlp as described since I believe it brings along all
of the ffmpeg stuff needed as well.

HTH


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden