you have any arbitrary video or audio conversion you need to accomplish.
- you have just manually tagged a bunch of
.AAC files before realizing that the app used to sync your phone can only take MP3s and M4As
- you have ripped the DVDs of an animated show with 2x11 min segments. unfortunately, the DVDs rip as one 22 min chunk, while plex is expecting one file per segment
- (or the opposite where things need merging and just to be fancy you want to keep chapter metadata too)
- you have a video that you want to convert to a bunch of PNGs for grabbing a clean screencap without having to slow right down or go frame by frame in MPC-HC/VLC/IINA/etc.
- you want to take the first 30 seconds of any song and turn it into a ringtone so you can drop your phone when battle! noble pokemon (phase 1) starts when you're not expecting it [^1]
and like an old friend, ffmpeg is there
the flags and parameters might be obscure
it might need searching for any use beyond
ffmpeg -i inputfile.in outfile.extension
but it's very rare it can't get the job done
[^1] or on work phone - mood matrix - running wild - fulfils the criteria of being loud enough to wake me up when I'm on-call, fast paced, unlikely to be used by anyone in the vicinity, and a song I don't mind never hearing again outside of that context. and also because emotions are running pretty high if I ever hear it