[leokennis]

Whenever I search for ffmpeg commands, there is always some person suggesting an 8 liner with 25 arguments, and next to that someone suggesting a command with two -i and one -o argument. On visual inspection both do the same, but I’m always left with the feeling that I did something wrong or just “got lucky” with the shorter command.

I would love a “unless you’re a pro with hyper specific needs, forget these 90% of arguments and only use this 10% in this way” type of guide.

[oefrha]

> 8 liner with 25 arguments

That’s tame for FFmpeg, likely just specifying a bunch of encoder parameters the simpler command left out for defaults, maybe with some input/output streams explicitly spelled out. If you want to look at really incomprehensible FFmpeg commands, try anything with filtergraphs.

[maupin]

Too true! For a recent video project I wrote a 300 line bash script to generate the ffmpeg arguments needed to accomplish what I was after.