<p>Where is the best documentation of ffmpeg and libavcodec?</p>

<p>It appears that ffmpeg supports many undocumented options that it is very hard to find a good reference.</p>

One of the things that can be quite useful:
```
```
ffmpeg -formats
```
```
lists all the codecs and containers that can be used...I haven't found any other good place where these can be found, probably because they depend on what libraries your ffmpeg copy was built with.  This page (
http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/general.html
) has some of them, but don't tell you what to enter at the command line.
Also, howto-pages.org has a decent tutorial here:
http://howto-pages.org/ffmpeg/