Comment by skydhash

5 days ago

[flagged]

I’m not sure if that’s true.

The number of times I’ve opened FFmpegs man page must number in the hundreds. I think I’m a pretty good conceptually, but I can’t remember all the flags. IE that –s is frame size, while -fs is file size.

And while that man page does have some examples, these days I tend to ask an LLM (or if it’s going to be simple Google) for an example.

  • That's why the recommended practice with shell usage is to write a script (or alias or function) and to use the long version of the flag in the script. Instead of having a complex invocation of ffmpeg, you'd have `flac2mp3 -q low file`.

Even as an "expert with several decades of experience" there are so many parts to a complex system that I still am a beginner in.

>Examples is for beginners.

No, not really, or I should say simple examples are for beginners.

Typically when I'm writing example pages I write it in

Simple example

Simple example

Simple example

Intermediate example

Intermediate example

Complex example.

Having complex examples can really help those that are looking at going beyond the basics.