FFmpeg in Lambda

Tip

This page is best viewed through the site search or through the AI.

Uses FFmpeg to process videos. In this example, it takes a clip.mp4 and grabs a single frame from it.

Tip

You don’t need to use a Lambda layer to use FFmpeg.

We use the ffmpeg-static package that contains pre-built binaries for all architectures.

index.ts

import ffmpeg from "ffmpeg-static";

We can use this to spawn a child process and run FFmpeg.

index.ts

spawnSync(ffmpeg, ffmpegParams, { stdio: "pipe" });

We don’t need a layer when we deploy this because SST will use the right binary for the target Lambda architecture; including arm64.

sst.config.ts

{
  nodejs: { install: ["ffmpeg-static"] }
}

All this is handled by nodejs.install.

sst.config.ts

const func = new sst.aws.Function("MyFunction", {
  url: true,
  memory: "2 GB",
  timeout: "15 minutes",
  handler: "index.handler",
  copyFiles: [{ from: "clip.mp4" }],
  nodejs: { install: ["ffmpeg-static"] },
});

View the full example.