Installation

The recommended way of running dash-mpd-cli is conveniently sandboxed in a Podman container. If you prefer to install the software and its dependencies on your computer in the traditional way, you can download a prebuilt binary or build from source yourself.

Binary releases are available on GitHub for GNU/Linux on AMD64 (statically linked against Musl Libc to avoid glibc versioning problems), Microsoft Windows on AMD64 and MacOS on aarch64 (“Apple Silicon”) and AMD64. These are built automatically on the GitHub continuous integration infrastructure.

You can also build from source using an installed Rust development environment:

cargo install dash-mpd-cli

This installs the binary to your installation root’s bin directory, which is typically $HOME/.cargo/bin.

External dependencies

You should also install the following dependencies:

  • the mkvmerge commandline utility from the MkvToolnix suite, if you download to the Matroska container format (.mkv filename extension). mkvmerge is used as a subprocess for muxing (combining) audio and video streams. See the --mkvmerge-location commandline argument if it’s not installed in a standard location (not on your PATH).

  • ffmpeg for muxing audio and video streams and for concatenating streams from a multi-period manifest. The ffprobe binary (distributed with ffmpeg) is required alongside the ffmpeg binary. See the --ffmpeg-location commandline argument if this is installed in a non-standard location.

  • vlc as an alternative application for muxing audio and video streams (sometimes VLC is able to mux certain streams that ffmpeg doesn’t support). See the --vlc-location commandline argument if this is installed in a non-standard location. Also see the --muxer-preference commandline argument to specify which muxing application to prefer for different container types.

  • the MP4Box commandline utility from the GPAC project, to help with subtitles in wvtt format. If it’s installed, MP4Box will be used to convert the wvtt stream to the more widely recognized SRT format. MP4Box can also be used for muxing audio and video streams to an MP4 container, as a fallback if ffmpeg and vlc are not available. See the --mp4box-location commandline argument if this is installed in a non-standard location.

  • the mp4decrypt commandline application from the Bento4 suite, if you need to fetch encrypted content. Binaries are available for common platforms. See the --mp4decrypt-location commandline argument if this is installed in a non-standard location.

  • for some types of streams that the mp4decrypt application is not able to decrypt (for example content in WebM containers), you should install the Shaka packager application developed by Google. See the --decryption-application commandline option to specify the choice of decryption application, and the --shaka-packager-location commandline argument if it is installed in a non-standard location.

  • the xsltproc commandline utility packaged with libxslt, which is used for the MPD rewriting functionality (the --drop-elements and --xslt-stylesheet commandline options).

Supported platforms

This crate is tested on the following platforms:

  • Our container images are tested using Podman on Linux and Windows

  • Linux on AMD64 (x86-64) and Aarch64 architectures

  • MacOS on AMD64 and Aarch64 architectures

  • Microsoft Windows 10 and Windows 11 on AMD64. We recommend you install the free Microsoft Terminal application from the Microsoft Store, instead of using the ancient and buggy command prompt.

  • Android 12 on Aarch64 via termux (you’ll need to install the ̀rust, binutils and ffmpeg packages, and optionally the mkvtoolnix, vlc and gpac packages). You’ll need to disable the cookies feature by building with --no-default-features.

  • FreeBSD/AMD64 and OpenBSD/AMD64. You’ll need to disable the cookies feature. Some of the external applications we depend on (e.g. mp4decrypt, Shaka packager) are poorly supported on OpenBSD.

It should also work on more obscure platforms, such as ppc64le and RISC-V, as long as you can install a recent Rust toolchain and have ffmpeg working.