I say this with the best of intentions: I wish this went a little farther. A lot of the complexity comes from transcoding options, filters/transformations applied to the video/audio streams, and control of how the file gets put back together.
(And sometimes there are oddities about how they interact, or there is one option that seems very deprecated. It's like Eclipse, it's an engineer's tool, it's extremely powerful but god had no hand in the creation of the UX whatsoever, it is the unholy amalgamation of hundreds of modules that usually work, usually, mostly.)
Give me checkboxes for "resize this video", "convert framerate", "decomb filter", "burn hardsubs filter", a reasonable set of x264 or x265 transcoding options, audio transcoding and downmux, and options for controlling how it all gets reassembled.
It might help to list out some simple use-cases and then look at the ffmpeg features that would be required to get there, and then support those. But again, it's sort of hard to capture everyone's use-cases, ffmpeg is such a swiss-army knife.
Personally I use it for:
* to direct-stream cut (no re-encoding) slices of videos for memes
* to handle game replay captures (sometimes with re-encoding, sometimes not) and combine separate audio tracks into a file for youtube
* to handle game replay captures (always with re-encoding) but with separate audio tracks preserved
* to cut out audio tracks/subs that I don't want from a given movie/show when it becomes annoying
* to transcode a movie/show for archival at the minimum size/maximum quality
etc
In particular I'm not sure how to really tell ffmpeg to handle multiple audio/sub streams without programmatic interaction - you kinda need to know there are 2 audio streams and 4 sub streams, because you need to tell it what to do with each stream you want included in the output file, even if you do the exact same thing to every stream. If you have one show that's a little weird, fine, but without some kind of front-end it gets difficult to handle arbitrary content that is similar but not quite.
What's crazy is that there are so so many variations of GUI options for FFMPEG. Typically, the GUI is limited by what the creator's use of FFMPEG tends to be. Which by all means is not a knock against it. It serves a purpose, and if it serves a purpose for them it probably is useful to others in the same way.
Then there are those that want a more generic version that allows all the bells & whistles to become available in the GUI. However, now you need to have a much better understanding of FFMPEG which the vast majority of FFMPEG users don't know (I myself learn new things everytime a new task is given).
At the end of the day, give it a go yourself to build a UI on top of FFMPEG to expose all of the things you just requested and see how painful it can be. I've done it multiple times for multiple jobs and not one of them was the same. It gets even more fun when you have sources with a combination of discrete and interleaved audio streams with high channel counts. Now, you have to probe the source and provide that info to the user to allow for output audio considerations. Based on those, you then need to potentially merge/join/split/map the audio. It's maddingly fun to those with those sense of perversions like me.
The issue with FFmpeg is that it's complex, so you need to understand what all the options do, but the interface is also complex, so you need to understand how to format what you want to do, even if you already have a good understanding of what you want from FFmpeg. E.g. the order of different options matter, applying some options to one stream vs. another, chaining filters together, formatting the filters, specifying the output options, etc.
This is, btw, a great time to plug "bropages". Manpages give you in-depth documentation on what each option does, bropages the idea is to give you a synthesis of an actual task being done with those command options, then you can mix-n-match to fit your use-case (if necessary).
The antidote to ffmpeg's arcane command-line has always been finding someone else who already did it and seeing what they did differently. There are, of course, many ways to skin the cat in ffmpeg, but you often just need to see some finished, working commands and start from there.
You could of course build that on a wiki somewhere, ffmpeg does have various examples in their docs, but bropages is a place to curate that sort of stuff.
You'll need a client for it (tldr itself is just the database). I recommend tealdeer [2].
Example:
$ tldr tar
Archiving utility.
Often combined with a compression method, such as gzip or bzip2.
More information: .
[c]reate an archive and write it to a [f]ile:
tar cf target.tar file1 file2 file3
[c]reate a g[z]ipped archive and write it to a [f]ile:
tar czf target.tar.gz file1 file2 file3