this is an absolutely toxic take of the issue. I took OP’s statement as less of a “I won’t read the manual” and more of a “I struggle to be able to read manuals”

There are many times I had read the manual, and then had to look up the issue further anyway because I either missed the poorly written section, or misunderstood what it was saying.

If you want a prime example of that, go look at ffmpeg and try to figure out how to select a specific language for subtitles on a video without looking it up online. its via -map as an advanced option, which is described as a parameter to extract specific streams (which also means they would need to map the video and the audio streams since including a -map removes every auto stream). but map doesn’t tell you subtitle tracks are index:s. it does tell you that you can look at stream specifiers for valid search options, which does include s as a type, and lets you know that you can use m for metadata tagging, but you would need to make the connection that the type is s, and the meta data search flag would be m:language:langcode, and you need to make the connection the entire string has to be concated so its index:s:m:language:langcode For someone who is learning ffmpeg and video transcoding, that is not a very good setup. The stream specifiers give a few examples of what the potentials are but, the location where it specifies the types are in a different area than the one where it specifies the metadata keys. At that point just asking online or searching is way easier.

Note: this is just an issue I have see people come across because ffmpeg is one of the more complicated programs (the man page is over 2300 lines)

is it in the manual? yes. is someone who doesn’t know how to use ffmpeg and is trying to learn it going to find it? that’s debatable.

If I was in that situation, my next step would be googling it, and if I couldn’t find it via searching, I would be reaching out to communities. At that point “RTFM” is useless to me.