A core tool in many video developers’ workflows, FFmpeg has a frustratingly steep learning curve and a difficult syntax to master and remember. Many of us write code to automate FFmpeg runs, and Node.js is a popular way to do that. However, current JavaScript interfaces to FFmpeg do nothing to ease the underlying difficulty of the tool. Instead, they mostly provide a one-to-one mapping of command line options in FFmpeg to method calls in JavaScript. In this talk, I will introduce a new JavaScript library for working with ffmpeg. With this new library, I’ve tried to model the conceptual structure of an FFmpeg CLI command, focusing on IO mappings and filtergraphs to enable better understanding and readability out of the box and allow for easier construction of the correct FFmpeg command the first time, with more readable code as an end product as well. During the talk, I’ll explain the motivation behind the library and show the mapping of conceptual structure in FFmpeg to library structure, then walk through a few examples of real FFmpeg commands and how they can be written using the library. Presented at Demuxed 2019 in San Francisco.