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by jjice 1899 days ago
We're all thinking it, but holy cow is FFmpeg one of the craziest pieces of software I have on my computer. The amount of neat things I've been able to do with it and toss them into a bash loop and go to bed is incredible. I'm sure a lot of us get a kick out of automating our tasks, and FFmpeg is king when it comes to that.
1 comments

ffmpeg and curl are two open source products I just tip my hat to.
FFmpeg, curl, and NumPy epitomizes the concept of “Do One Thing and Do it Well.”
What exactly is ffmpeg's one thing?

Or curl's for that matter?

Curl's "one thing" is to get files from the network in every conceivable way possible. Ffmpeg's is to convert media files between every conceivable set of formats possible.
Curl does loads of stuff, supports so many protocols - HTTP, LDAP, FTP etc.
CLI video editing

Make web requests

ImageMagick and gnuplot.
GraphicsMagick is like ImageMagick but much more sane & performant.

http://www.graphicsmagick.org/

I'd add Pandoc to all the ones mentioned in sibling comments.
jq is a neat young one on this list I think

also at the metalevel, gnu parallel

I'd like to add exiftool to this list.
+ jq, youtube-dl