Understanding and using ffmpeg settings

Question

Where is the best documentation of ffmpeg and libavcodec?

It appears that ffmpeg supports many undocumented options that it is very hard to find a good reference.

Answer 1

• ffmpeg -formats
• ffmpeg -help
• ffmpeg.org/documentation.html and the
• source code as last resort.

Unfortunately, this is not easy to figure out.

Answer 2

One of the things that can be quite useful:

ffmpeg -formats

lists all the codecs and containers that can be used...I haven't found any other good place where these can be found, probably because they depend on what libraries your ffmpeg copy was built with. This page (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/general.html) has some of them, but don't tell you what to enter at the command line.

Also, howto-pages.org has a decent tutorial here: http://howto-pages.org/ffmpeg/

Answer 3

ffmpeg --help

ffmpeg -formats

ffmpeg -codecs

ffmpeg -

If you use Linux, try man ffmpeg

ffmpeg -decoders

ffmpeg -encoders

ffmpeg -protocols

ffmpeg -filters

And of course, if you want to do something and you can't figure it out, google is your friend. The results in the FFmpeg mailing lists are generally useful, as are results that link to stackoverflow and stackexchange. Even Yahoo Answers has occasionally given me an answer. FFmpeg documentation is also really nice.