The down side is that 
-x '1 2 3' -y 4 5

[download]

would have to be passed as 

--extra-ffmpeg-param='-x '\''1 2 3'\'' -y 4 5'

[download]

You'd need nested quoting, which is very tricky.

This can probably be mitigated by mixing quotes. 

--extra-ffmpeg-param='-x "1 2 3" -y 4 5'

[download]

And this isn't just tricky to build manually; this is also tricky to build programmatically from the shell. Like, what if you wanted to wanted to do the equivalent of ffmpeg -x "$x"? It would look something like 

# to_shell_lit() - Creates a shell literal
# Usage:  printf '%s\n' "$( to_shell_lit "..." "..." "..." )"
to_shell_lit() {
    local prefix=''
    local p
    for p in "$@" ; do
        printf "$prefix"\'
        printf %s "$p" | sed "s/'/'\\\\''/g"
        printf \'
        prefix=' '
    done
}

--extra-ffmpeg-param="$( to_shell_lit -x "$x" )"

[download]

(Source)

This is part of the reason I suggested using multiple args. 

-X '-x 1 2 3' -X '-y 4'

[download]
-X "-x $x" -X '-y 4'

[download]
or 
-X 'x=1 2 3' -X 'y=4'

[download]
-X "x=$x" -X 'y=4'

[download]

In reply to Re^3: Parsing a command-line string into an array by ikegami
in thread Parsing a command-line string into an array by bliako

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