ffmpeg
is a command line utility that presents a API to interacting with a variety of media types/encodings in a uniform fashion.
Depending on the ffmpeg
distribiont, you may get access to utilities such as ffprobe
(which provides information on a file) and ffplay
(will play back a file). Those tools are critical.
Those tools, by default, will show all the arguments that ffmpeg
was compiled with, which can get a little verbose. If you're going to run many ffmpeg commands, I suggest you get used to passing the -hide_banner
argument.