The FFmpeg libraries are dynamically linked to the builds provided, which means that you'll need a local installation of these libraries in order for the external to work.
A package manager is probably the ideal way to install them. Otherwise, they are available at ffmpeg.org/download.html, just be sure to get the "Shared" builds, and place them in a location where the external is able to find them.

Includes the following features:

• play/pause and seek functionality
• changing the speed of playback
• reading and iterating through m3u playlists
• opening files from http urls.
• retrieving metadata
• specifying additional channels as creation args for files with surround sound.
  • In the help file, you'll notice ffplay~ has the creation arguments 1 2 5 6.
    The 5 and 6 represent rear-left and rear-right channels.
  • A full list of available channels can be found here: github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavutil/channel_layout.h

EDIT: changes in playback speed should now have smoother transitions
EDIT2: forgot to add ufloat.h to the .zip

ffplay.zip

Hi, and thank you for sharing this external @myQwil
It works well under ubuntu.

Any chance to have an OSX/Windows version?

Cheers!

You can find all my pd externals here: https://github.com/myQwil/pdxtra

I wasn't able to build for OSX, but only because the environment I use for OSX builds is really old and out-dated, and I was not able to do a brew install of ffmpeg. For anyone with a more up-to-date version of OSX, they should be able to build it by installing ffmpeg and running make

As for Windows, I did a 64-bit build (m_amd64), but not 32-bit. I came across an issue when attempting to build for 32-bit, though I can't recall at the moment what the exact issue was.

Great thanks.

I managed to compile it for OSX 10.15.4 using my brew installed ffmpeg version 4.4.1 against pd 0.52.1.
Here is the external (don't know if it is the right way to distribute it), I modified the makefile to add pd sources inside. I tested the http example with ogg , also a webradio stream and it works well.

As for Windows, it's more complex for me as I don't use this crazy systems, but many of my students do.
But using 64bit externals with 64bit pd is the modern choice right? Is it possible to test this 64bit build?

ffplay_OSX.zip

This should be what you need for the Windows version: https://www.gyan.dev/ffmpeg/builds/ffmpeg-release-full-shared.7z

Inside the zip, there's a 'bin' folder and you just need to extract the .dll files and place them in the same folder as ffplay~.m_amd64. I'm assuming it'll still work. Even though the ffmpeg libraries are newer than when I built it, no big changes have been made to how any of the functions are called.

Also, thank you for sharing your OSX build

Thank you for the ffmpeg windows package!
But, I am still missing the file ffplay~.m_amd64 right?

ffplay~.m_amd64 can be found inside of ffplay.zip
It's basically a dll with a special naming convention so that 64 and 32-bit builds of the same external can reside in the same folder

Ah ok, so I tried but It didn't work unfortunately, "The specified module could not be found (126)", it's sound like a missing Microsoft C++ redistributable package or something...

My guess is it either needs a fresh build or it's missing some other dependency from MSYS2/MinGW.
I recommend trying Dependency Walker. It might be able to shed some light on which dependencies aren't being met. Their site: https://www.dependencywalker.com/

If that doesn't work, I'll see about doing a fresh build tomorrow

Okay, I think I've found out the problem. Here's the list of dependencies of ffplay~.m_amd64:
avcodec-58.dll
avformat-58.dll
avutil-56.dll
swresample-3.dll

But all the libraries have been updated since I built it, so the version numbers in their names have been incremented to 59, 57, and 4.

So, you could probably just rename the dll's and my guess is it'll still work.

Great.
Renaming files wasn't successful, but thanks to those informations, I found ffmpeg-4.4.1-full_build on the website which contains the correct files revision and that made it.

So for those interested, here is a distribuable FFplay~ for win64 (27Mb)

Performing a static build is also an option. That would make it so that the libraries are built into the external. I've always been on the fence about distributing a static build though because I've read that some of the decoders used in the ffmpeg library are proprietary. Their site talks about that near the bottom of this page: https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html

It sounds like it's only a problem if someone, as they put it, "starts trying to make money from patented technologies" but since this is being distributed freely, it's probably not an issue.

@myQwil said:

https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html

Yes, I guess since it is a free distribution it must have no issues.

What would be a next step is to be able to add it to deken externals management, but a lib that big or with such dependencies open new questions...