Overview

FFMPEG is the best, fastest transcode and swiss-army knife for video and audio files. It’s easy to install and use on a Mac (using homebrew). It sucks to install on a PC, but it can run faster - if you have a system that outperforms your Mac. All the cheat sheet things below can be modified for different codecs, and an infinite number of other ways.

Installation

On mac, I recommend installing FFMPEG through Homebrew. Very easy. Google it. 

On windoze, I recommend installing FFMPEG through Scoop. You install Scoop via Powershell (non-admin), and then you run FFMPEG via Command Prompt. FFMPEG in a WSL environment, while easier to install in some cases, does not perform nearly as well without significant tweaking of the FFMPEG commands. Vanilla FFMPEG doesn’t work well in WSL(!)

Updating

If you used homebrew to install FFMPEG, it’s this easy:

brew update && brew upgrade ffmpeg