FotoWeb, Color Factory, and Index Manager rely on FFmpeg to perform video transcoding. They require manual installation of FFmpeg on your Fotoware servers(s) as described below.

As the ffmpeg.org website changes its design from time to time, the following directions may not precisely reflect what you're seeing on the site. 

Note: Fotoware requires FFmpeg version 4, FFmpeg version 5 is not currently supported.

Note: When updating any of our products from version 8.0 to version 8.1 , you must install FFmpeg again using these instructions. You can also copy the FFmpeg binaries from the old location to the new location.

1. Go to https://ffmpeg.org/download/
2. Follow the links to the Windows version as you want to download executables for Windows.
   Several suppliers may be available to download FFmpeg from. Choose one to go to their website.
3. Download the Windows 64-bit, static, and licensed as GPLv3full release of FFmpeg. Look carefully at the available versions, Fotoware only supports FFmeg version 4. The binaries you need are typically shown in a Release section on the vendor website.
4. Open the downloaded archive and locate the bin folder inside it.
   Note: Some of the releases are packaged in 7-Zip format - you can obtain the 7-Zip utility from 7-zip.org (external link)
5. Copy “ffmpeg.exe” and “ffprobe.exe” to these program folders based on which Fotoware product(s) and versions you're using:

• 8.1 versions
  • Index Manager: “C:\Program Files\Fotoware\Index Manager”
  • Color Factory: “C:\Program Files\Fotoware\Color Factory ”
  • FotoWeb: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Fotoware\FotoWeb\Scripts\Python\fotoware\videotranscoder\bin\win8x64”
• 8.0 versions
  • Index Manager: “C:\Program Files\Fotoware\Index Manager 8.0”
  • Color Factory: “C:\Program Files\Fotoware\Color Factory 8.0”
  • FotoWeb: “C:\Program Files (x86)\Fotoware\FotoWeb 8.0\Scripts\Python\fotoware\videotranscoder\bin\win8x64”

7. Restart the Fotoware services.