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[Bug]: FFmpeg is not being recognized | And the download is extremely slow #248
Description
Before reporting
- I'm on the latest release and the issue still happens.
- I searched existing issues and didn't find a duplicate.
What happened?
I’m using StemDeck 0.8.0 Alpha 4 in Windows 11 and placed FFmpeg inside data/ffmpeg (once with the original folder structure where ffmpeg.exe and the other files are inside the bin subfolder, and—just to be safe—I also copied the contents of bin directly into the ffmpeg folder). Unfortunately, StemDeck doesn’t detect it and instead downloads the files from gyan.dev (as I saw in the source file main.rs). That download runs at a miserable 0.1 MB/s. I had downloaded FFmpeg from GitHub before launching StemDeck for the first time, and my connection (10 MB/s) was fully utilized. After about 15 minutes, the download finally completed (while I was documenting this “bug” here). I was starting to think it would never finish, because the 0.1 MB/s usage could have been caused by other programs as well.
Anyway, I’d like to suggest that the next release downloads FFmpeg from GitHub instead of gyan.dev.
It's linked on the official site of ffmpeg: https://github.com/BtbN/FFmpeg-Builds/releases
Thank you very much for your software — I will test it right away
Steps to reproduce
Open SteamDeck the first time, so it will run the Setup
Operating system
Windows
StemDeck version
0.8.0-alpha4
How did you install it?
Windows ZIP
Logs / screenshots
No response
Activity
unvency commentedon Jul 5, 2026
Since you asked in another issue thread for location: Mine is Germany
thcp commentedon Jul 6, 2026
Hi @unvency, thank you for the detailed report, and for the kind words about StemDeck.
You were spot on. The next release switches the Windows FFmpeg download from gyan.dev to the BtbN GitHub builds you linked, which are served over GitHub's CDN and should saturate your connection instead of crawling at 0.1 MB/s. On top of that, StemDeck will now detect an FFmpeg you place yourself in data/ffmpeg, including the original layout where the binaries live in a bin/ subfolder, so it won't download at all when you have already provided one.
The change is in an open pull request (#249) and will ship in the next release. Thanks again for taking the time, and for the great suggestion.
If you would like to follow along with releases, we post updates on X (Twitter) at https://x.com/StemDeckApp and Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/stemdeck.
fix(desktop): Windows FFmpeg from BtbN GitHub + detect bin/ layout (#248
thcp commentedon Jul 6, 2026
Hi @unvency , pre-release ready for testing https://github.com/stemdeckapp/stemdeck/releases/tag/v0.8.0-alpha.5
thcp commentedon Jul 8, 2026
Hello again @unvency , sorted with the latest release :)
Give PATH and yt-dlp the verified FFmpeg, and split the e2e job (#685)