in reply to Parsing a command-line string into an array

Another option is to use the same approach as find -exec.

prog [options] --ffmpeg [ffmpeg args] [sentinel] [options] [args]

I'm not a fan of this approach because of its down sides.


Footnotes:

  1. ";" and "+" serve as sentinels for POSIX find -exec. ";" must be escaped since it already has meaning to the shell, though.