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
and most importantly why must things be so ridiculously complicated
@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 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
@Felthry ohh. i'm not familiar unfortunately