[alwayslikethis]

I don't think ffmpeg is actually _extremely_ complex. A lot of the complexity (all the flags) you feel belonging to ffmpeg actually belongs to encoders (libx264, libx265, aomenc, libvpx, all the hardware encoders from each vendor). They each have various options meaning different things. ffmpeg is just an interface for them.

[duskwuff]

And it's a genuinely complex problem space. ffmpeg supports some pretty wild audio/video transformations, especially once you start getting into filter graphs (e.g. combining multiple audio/video streams into a single output); its command-line interface reflects that complexity.

[ta1243]

That's fair, although the stuff I can do with ffmpeg filters amazes me, and I barely scratch the surface

I tend to include the codec developers in the "ffmpeg developers" for simplicity as there are many that work in both areas.

The complexity in using those codecs isn't the ffmpeg command line, it's knowing which options to use.