[FFmpeg-user] Best documentation web site ( or other source )

[Phil Rhodes]

> So my question on documentation is a very real and reasonable one; WHICH 
> ONES are the CURRENTLY best documentation sites??

There really aren't any, for several reasons:

- ffmpeg does a huge amount of things, making an exhaustive documentation effort difficult to organise.
- ffmpeg changes very rapidly, and any such site would be outdated in days or weeks
- nobody is ever going to get paid to do it, so given all this, it's never really been done.

The lack of documentation for both the ffmpeg commandline tools and the asssociated libraries is a longstanding bugbear of mine, but unfortunately it's often the way with open source. Unfortunately there is often no other way than to ask on the mailing list. For instance, I recently had a problem with compatibility of mult audio ichannel Quicktime files which needed two of the four channels dropped; presumably it is possible to do this wilth ffmpeg, but there is no way of finding out how. I ended up using a rather sub-optimal solution involving reencoding them using a lossless intermediate codec.

Phil