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'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