I genuinely feel like ffmpeg is kind of like a "secret weapon".
Occasionally my dad will need some help with video or audio, and he'll see me hack together an ffmpeg command (even on Android with termux in a pinch!) and be utterly astounded. Being able to quickly slice up the video without re-encoding, or being able to stitch video together without a re-encode, or being able to arbitrarily glue a bunch of videos together all of different formats and it will work flawlessly.
It's a piece of software I would gladly pay hundreds of dollars for, and yet it manages to be free. I think I'll visit their donate page right now.
It’s amazing how many companies are literally just ffmpeg-as-a-service. It wasn’t a ton of money but I saved my last company a few hundred bucks a month they were paying a service to convert .gif files to .mp4
ImageMagick as well! At a big social media company I used to work at [1], they were spending a not-insignificant amount of money (in the millions) to their CDN/caching provider just to have images resized and converted to PNG and WebP. I am pretty sure all this CDN was doing was running the image through ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick and calling it a day, and charging absurd quantities of money to do it.
[1] it's not hard to find my employment history but I ask you not to say it publicly here
Occasionally my dad will need some help with video or audio, and he'll see me hack together an ffmpeg command (even on Android with termux in a pinch!) and be utterly astounded. Being able to quickly slice up the video without re-encoding, or being able to stitch video together without a re-encode, or being able to arbitrarily glue a bunch of videos together all of different formats and it will work flawlessly.
It's a piece of software I would gladly pay hundreds of dollars for, and yet it manages to be free. I think I'll visit their donate page right now.