[FFmpeg-user] Any better documentation?

[Moritz Barsnick]

Hi Stephen,

On Mon, Aug 04, 2014 at 23:48:19 -0700, Stephen Ho wrote:
> 
> I was introduced to this wonderful program, but I find it very hard to use,
> and the pdf document I paid $9.95 is not very helpful. can't find the man
> page either.

You paid money for documentation?????

> I did this command   ffmpeg -i abc.mp4 -f hevc abc.avi   got my file size
> to 5% of the original, and the resolution is really bad and no sound.

I believe HEVC support is quite experimental, but I may be wrong.

> Then I did  ffmpeg -i abc.mp4 -f h264 abc.avi and the file size is 45%, the
> video resolution is great (like the input file), but still no sound.
> 
> What did I do wrong?

You didn't understand that the various codecs have default parameters,
which may or may not suit your needs. You need to fine-tune them.

Furthermore, not getting sound is not normal, so you need to show us
the complete command line and the complete, _uncut_ console output of
your ffmpeg command.

> My purpose is to keep everything the same, resolution same, but use a
> different compression engine to safe disk space.....

(We don't know the parameters of your original file.)

> anything I can read to get a better understand to the command line syntax?

This is a good start:
https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/Encode/H.264

Moritz