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by Eisenstein 1052 days ago
People like to say that ffmpeg is complicated but when you make it into a nice gui it doesn't get any easier -- it is video compression itself that is complicated. No software could make it easier without making the decisions for you, like handbrake or some other click-through interface.

I'm not certain, but I highly suspect that if I sat down and learned about digital video encoding and compression on a granular enough level then figuring out how to do things in ffmpeg would be rather intuitive. Does anyone have experience doing this?

1 comments

I've written DirectShow filters around 17 years back for WindowsMobile (not Windows Phone) so I've a decent understanding of codecs and containers.

Formats like mkv or codecs like HEVC didn't exist back then but the concept of manipulating audio/video through a bunch of filters is a wonderful one and most (all?) a/v transforming software does it. When I started looking into FFmpeg's man pages I could connect the dots and start using it after a day of fooling around.

I'm a CLI lover and man page reader so perhaps it worked to my advantage.