Understanding and using ffmpeg settings

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

Unfortunately, this is not easy to figure out.

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/