FFProbe.Analyse getting the error 'The system cannot find the file specified' when given a string

Question

I want to compress every video within every drive and its sub-directories so the code I have used so far finds each drive and looks for .mp4 locations. Then it uses that list of strings to compress each file but it comes up with this error at:

var mediaInfo = FFProbe.Analyse(filePath: d)

and

.FromFileInput(d, verifyExists: true)

System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: 'The system cannot find the file specified'

I checked what the .Analyse needs and it is a string and d is a string which has the right path location C:\\Users\\Helix\\Desktop\\apartment\\5 Little Monkeys Swinging In The Tree.mp4" which I thought would work but it does not seem to like it. What am I doing wrong?

I am also curious as to if GetDrives() works on network drives? And if it does would two servers running this code conflict when grabbing the same file at the same time?

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using MediaToolkit;
using MediaToolkit.Model;
using FFMpegCore;
using FFMpegCore.Enums;

namespace Video_Compressor_for_Servers
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void CompAll_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {

            //An empty list for later to collect strings
            List<string> file = new List<string>();

            //extract primary drives strings into a list since there could be more than just C:\
            DriveInfo[] allDrives = DriveInfo.GetDrives();

            
            foreach (DriveInfo d in allDrives)
            {
                //The d.Name output has "Drive C:\" as the output. remove the "Drive " part first
                var replacement = d.Name.Replace("Drive ", "");

                /*Grab each files location with the Directory tool from the earlier IO libary.
                GetFiles is a subcommand of directory with options in the brackets. These
                options can be found in more detail by seaching for GetFiles C#*/
                string[] files = Directory.GetFiles(@"C:\Users\Helix\Desktop\apartment\","*.mp4", SearchOption.AllDirectories);// replacement//AllDirectories

                //Convert the array to a list
                List<string> templist = files.ToList();

                //Add them to the earlier empty list we made
                file.AddRange(templist);

            }



            //Now that we have paths to all the files we need we can now compress them
            foreach (string d in file)
            {
                var mediaInfo = FFProbe.Analyse(filePath: d);
                //Open the video file with MediaToolkit
                FFMpegArguments
                .FromFileInput(d, verifyExists: true)
                .OutputToFile(d, false, options => options
                    .WithVideoCodec(VideoCodec.LibX264)
                    .WithConstantRateFactor(21)
                    .WithAudioCodec(AudioCodec.Aac)
                    .WithVariableBitrate(4)
                    .WithVideoFilters(filterOptions => filterOptions
                        .Scale(VideoSize.Ed))
                    .WithFastStart())
                .ProcessSynchronously();
            }

        }
    }
}

Answer 1

You need to download both ffprobe.exe and ffmpeg.exe. The executable is missing not the media one.