[paulmd]

This is, btw, a great time to plug "bropages". Manpages give you in-depth documentation on what each option does, bropages the idea is to give you a synthesis of an actual task being done with those command options, then you can mix-n-match to fit your use-case (if necessary).

http://bropages.org/ffmpeg

The antidote to ffmpeg's arcane command-line has always been finding someone else who already did it and seeing what they did differently. There are, of course, many ways to skin the cat in ffmpeg, but you often just need to see some finished, working commands and start from there.

You could of course build that on a wiki somewhere, ffmpeg does have various examples in their docs, but bropages is a place to curate that sort of stuff.

[thrtythreeforty]

For even more brevity, there's tldr [1], which is short-n-sweet "how do I do the most common things with this tool."

You'll need a client for it (tldr itself is just the database). I recommend tealdeer [2].

Example:

    $ tldr tar

      Archiving utility.
      Often combined with a compression method, such as gzip or bzip2.
      More information: <https://www.gnu.org/software/tar>.

      [c]reate an archive and write it to a [f]ile:

          tar cf target.tar file1 file2 file3

      [c]reate a g[z]ipped archive and write it to a [f]ile:

          tar czf target.tar.gz file1 file2 file3

[1]: https://tldr.sh/

[2]: https://github.com/dbrgn/tealdeer

[thaumasiotes]

    Often combined with a compression method, such as gzip or bzip2.

    [...]

    [c]reate a g[z]ipped archive and write it to a [f]ile:

       tar czf target.tar.gz file1 file2 file3

That helpful bracketing notation is going to break down as soon as you actually want to deal with bzip2.

There's no real problem, but I never like it when I'm given an example that seems to be going out of its way to suggest something untrue.