[thaumasiotes]

I wrote a powershell script to run an ffmpeg workflow. I'm confident that this was a better idea than either of the other two approaches that you seem to be advocating for:

(a) instead of writing a shell script to operate a shell-operated tool, write a python script with a bunch of os.system('shell out') commands.

(b) instead of just invoking ffmpeg to do the things you want done, install an ffmpeg development library, and call the functions that ffmpeg itself calls to do those things.

What would be the argument for either of those?