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HandBrake uses some parts of FFmpeg libraries: libavformat, libavcodec, and libavfilter. But even so, it's an entire different app, the decoders, some demuxers and some filters are the same, but the way they are connected together is entirely different than FFmpeg cli app.

Named pipes don't work?

Or some bash magic: `handbrake-cli -i <(cat video-file.mp4)`?

I never used handbrake-cli, only used the gui before, so I have no idea.

No need for cat…

I think it is needed in bash. In zsh you can do <(<file) but I don't think that redirect without a command works.

The cat command is meant as a placeholder for whatever other commands are used for printing out a file stream to stdout.

HB (surprisingly when I firstly learned) builds lots of components from scratch instead of just using FFMPEG (of course, it still uses FFMPEG lib extensively in some other parts).

It's one of the very few transcoders that isn't just a wrapper of FFMPEG (which is both an advantage and a disadvantage).