how the hell do computer video formats work
this is a serious question by the way, how the hell do they work
why does ffmpeg have so many options
why does it always seem to output .mkv even when I encode the video as mp4
what are all these codecs we've never heard of
@Felthry ffmpeg has to be complicated because it turns out that storing video information is a super hard problem and you have to make compromises, and the best compromises to make depend on your specific use case
@monorail but like... what's .mkv and why does it want to output that always instead of like .mp4 or something
@Felthry mkv is a video container format like mp4 is
what command are you running where you're trying to get .mp4 but it's giving you mkv?
@monorail I'm just using ffe, a frontend I found because the documentation of ffmpeg is _way_ over my heads
@Felthry ohh. i'm not familiar unfortunately
@monorail I can change the .mkv in the output filename to .mp4 but I don't know if that's actually changing the format or if our media player just transparently corrects/ignores the file extension
@monorail how do container formats work
@Felthry they can store one or more information streams inside them for things like video, audio, subtitles, etc
and that's the extent of my knowledge
and most importantly why must things be so ridiculously complicated