Since macOS is mostly designed to support software with graphical user interfaces, it doesn’t provide an easy way to install command line software. You can close the window or quit Terminal entirely just like any other application on your Mac, but you might as well leave it open, since you’ll need it in the next step. (Where yourname is your user name, and yourcomputer is the network ID of your Mac.) Or just click Spotlight (🔍) in your menu bar, type Terminal, and hit Return to open Terminal.Ī mostly blank, white window will appear, with a couple of lines of text ending in a prompt like this: ~ % You can find Terminal in the Utilities folder in your Mac’s main Applications folder.

It lets you type commands on a command line prompt, and run programs that do not have a graphical user interface, like ffmpeg. Terminal is an application that is included with macOS. See GUI Alternatives below if you decide these instructions are too much trouble! :) Open Terminal I’m happy to help anyone who runs into trouble with these instructions (especially if your troubles help me improve the instructions!). It assumes no previous experience with the Terminal command line. This guide covers how to install and use ffmpeg on your Mac. Installing and running it on your Mac can be a little bit of a hassle, especially if you’ve never used the command line in Terminal before, but I’ve written up these detailed instructions to get you started.

There is a free tool called ffmpeg that makes it easy to convert an original video file into something much smaller (as little as 10% the size, in some cases!) but still very high quality. In these times of communicating remotely, sending video files to each other (and even to customers) is becoming a daily reality! But the videos that our phones and computers record are often extremely large, as they are meant to be high-quality originals.

Install ffmpeg m1 mac