Ffmpeg is an unusual piece of software. It’s CLI arguments (to me) are baffling. But it’s been around so long that there’s so many answered questions online for virtually anything you want it to do. Don’t bother reading the man page, go to google first.
There are also tools with a GUI that make use of ffmpeg (calling them a GUI-wrapper is probably not fair). And ofc, they likely can't do everything ffmpeg CLI can.
I feel like the basics are simple and intuitive. Enough use of it and you will not consult docs for the most basic tasks. Then you start to think "but how do I...?" and go to google. I tend to also forget the answer after a few months.
> I tend to also forget the answer after a few months
You can add comments to the end of tricky commands with the # character. Then at a later date you can search for commands using the contents of those comments, using something like C-r.
I felt the same for years, but when you really dig into it you can learn a handful of flags that will get you what you want 90% of the time, and you can Go to Google after that set fails you.
You don't need a config file for simple cases. There's no firm boundary between simple cases and cases where you'd want to use a config file; it's partly a quantity thing, partly familiarity.
It could probably be nicer with a way to specify a file to read options from, but it's not as if there aren't plenty of ways to represent an argv as a text file already, so it doesn't seem like a high priority.
its a very good example of what is truly useful conflicting with widely held notions of whats important to make good software. basically, despite the arcane invocations, i find it gets the job done more painlessly than any alternative most of the time.
