[FFmpeg-user] Hello and newbie question

[Phil Rhodes]

> Thanks for the sarcastic and unhelpful reply!


I'm sorry you got that sort of response. It happens often. Welcome to open source, unfortunately.

As you say the history behind this is largely irrelevant to anyone who isn't deeply involved in opensource politics, but briefly, ffmpeg is open source software so more or less anyone can do more or less anything they like with it. As such a group of people decided to start working on a separate version independently of the group which had traditionally done so. A few egos are bruised. It's difficult to figure out what's really going on - it's political - and equally difficult to figure out which version is best in any given situation. Both groups of people will claim that theirs is best. Obviously the version that comes with ubuntu is not "deliberately" broken and both versions contain "hundreds of known bugs", or at least they did last time I checked the bug trackers (after all, all nontrivial software contains bugs).


But anyway, there it is.

> As I said I am very new and looking for help, the command is ffmpeg
> so how the hell would someone new to this know that? 

You wouldn't. It's not your fault.

Phil