There is a piece of software running behind YouTube, VLC, Chrome, Plex, and Kodi. It has been around since 2000, costs absolutely nothing, and could replace at least three subscriptions sitting in your credit card statement right now. While it is the engine that powers the modern internet, most people have never typed its name. That tool is FFmpeg, a free, open-source command-line framework that handles pretty much any audio or video task a human or machine could dream up. Technically, it is a massive collection of libraries — such as libavcodec and libavformat — that enable these famous apps to “understand” and play almost any file format in existence. Yes, there is a learning curve. Yes, it lives in a terminal window with no friendly buttons. But once you get past that, what you unlock is something absurd in the best possible way. On Windows, the process of installing it is slightly more manual than a standard installer; you download a pre-built binary from the official FFmpeg website at ffmpeg.org (which will typically point …