[bscphil]

ffmpeg arguments generally compose pretty well, although it's powerful enough that (as other comments have mentioned) for special use cases you do often have to look things up.

If you can remember 3 or 4 things you can do most stuff without looking anything up, however:

    -i -> input file
    -vcodec / -acodec -> video and audio codec; "copy" specifies copying the input stream
    -vn / -an / -sn -> disable the video / audio / subtitles in the output file
    -ss / -t -> specify the start time and length of the conversion from the input file

So, just by looking at the above, you can easily see how to extract audio (or any individual stream). For gifs specifically I would recommend using gifski which has much better results anyway. For cropping, I don't find the `-vf crop` syntax too bad.

[nebster]

But when you have differing behaviour based on argument position like putting -ss / -t before the -i or after (fast seek vs accurate seek), it gets confusing pretty fast.