FFmpeg is really great. The only wish I'd have is for the usage to become simpler - both for regular stuff, but also for advanced filtering.
If anyone remembers, avisynth was pretty cool back in the days. You could kind of script video/audio manipulations, a bit like a UNIX/Linux pipe, but kind of simpler, in my opinion. FFmpeg allows for many similar operations, but remembering anything here is ... hard. I'd love for the whole usage API to become much simpler, but it seems nobody among the ffmpeg dev team is considering this. :(
I can't be the only one with that wish though ...
It does not diminish ffmpeg being so great in general, but I think it could be better.
Once I got over the -filter_complex is well, complex phobia, it isn't that bad. The command line makes it look daunting to be sure. But thinking of it as the name suggests of "filter chains" makes it less daunting. It is still cumbersome as every thing needs to be in the command.
Debugging commands gets hairy the more complex they get but you'll get muscle memory on how to search/replace to make line breaks to make it easier, similar to breaking up gnarly SQL. The worst part about debugging is the error messages can be misleading when it interprets the filter chain incorrectly because of some issue you've typoed in there somewhere. Even those start to become recognizable as "it thinks this, which means I probably messed up this other thing instead". To be fair, I work with ffmpeg daily using some commands that make your eyes bleed. So for someone using it every now and then, the practice from repetitive use just takes longer.
Also, saving things as shell scripts helps a lot. A simple script that does the same thing with a few adjustable params can be done with %1, %2 usage or even cleaner with getopts. You can then change small things within a tested complex command.
If you're just looking for an easier solution for encoding video ("regular stuff") then Handbrake is the go-to tool for that.
One of the best uses of LLMs is to help find the right command line options for tools like ffmpeg.
It won't always give you a perfect answer the first time, but it's much better than memorizing the manual or interpreting a forum discussion. Haven't used it for ffmpeg, but lots of other command lines.
I find it helps if you paste in the the ffmpeg manual and get the ai to use that as source. Helps it stick to real params.
Because ffmpeg is built on the Unix chained utility philosophy I find ai is also good at building scripts the use it as well
If there’s one thing I’ve entirely handed over to our AI overlords it’s the ffmpeg command line.