Author here. I've been encoding video for about 25 years, and FFmpeg has been part of most of that. Started at M6 Web in France, 4 servers in a basement producing HLS before hardware encoders had it.

I wrote the full story behind this: https://www.streaming-radar.com/p/i-built-a-wordle-for-ffmpe...

It's partly about the game, partly an homage to people like Fabio Sonnati (who documented FFmpeg for 15 years on a WordPress blog), Jan Ozer (whose book is literally called "Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video", and I built a game that turns encoding back into guesswork), and Fabrice Bellard who started it all.

I emailed FFmpeg to ask permission. No response yet. Which tracks, they barely have time to patch bugs found by Google's AI.

CLI in Rust: https://github.com/ludobos/ffmpuzzle-cli

I also wrote about the invisible French engineers behind streaming (Bellard, VLC, GPAC): https://www.streaming-radar.com/p/les-streamers-de-lombre-30...

I also wrote a piece on the invisible French engineers behind streaming (Bellard, VLC, GPAC): https://www.streaming-radar.com/p/les-streamers-de-lombre-30...