But the chances of you being able to achieve the same with the linked tool are also zero. That's all I am really saying. I'm not arguing that ffmpeg can get very complex (I was talking about "basic" ffmpeg usage in my original comment), just that `ff convert inputfile to ext` is not really simpler than `ffmpeg -i inputfile -o outputfile.ext`, which is all that this (this specific) tool is really doing.
But my issue with the linked tool is that it does none of the things you mentioned. All it does it make already very easy things even easier. Is it really that much harder to remember `ffmpeg -i inputfile outputfile.ext` than `ff convert inputfile to ext`?
I've explained this in other replies here but I am neither saying that ffmpeg wrappers are automatically bad, nor that ffmpeg cannot be complicated. I am only saying that this specific tool does not really help much.
> Not really sure how else I was supposed to interpret your comment
Yes, that was a bit facetious of me, I apologize for that.
> What is so bad about the existence of this project?
Being very blunt: The fact that it reinforces the extremely common misconception that a) converting between containers like mkv and mp4 will always require reencoding and that b) there is a single way to reencode a video (hence suggesting that there is no "bad" way to reencode a video), seeing as next to no encoding settings are exposed.
I'm not saying it couldn't be better (and I even gave examples), my point is that the drawbacks of such a wrapper outweigh the benefits, at least when it's such an oversimplified one. I've said in other replies how I'd be very interested in e.g. an alternative libav* frontend with better defaults and more consistent argument syntax, but I don't think that this invalidates my criticism of the linked project.
Sure, I agree with all of this. Like I said above, the syntax (and, even more, the defaults) isn't great. I'm just arguing that "improving the syntax" should not mean "hiding complexity that should not be hidden", as the linked project does. An alternative ffmpeg frontend (i.e. a new CLI frontend using the libav* libraries like ffmpeg is, not a wrapper for the ffmpeg CLI program) with better syntax and defaults but otherwise similar capabilities would be a very interesting project.
(The answer to your question is that both -vcodec and -c:v are valid, but I imagine that's not the point.)
> The biggest problem is open source teams really don't get people on board that focus on customer and product the way commercial software does.
I believe in this case it may be more of a case of backwards compatibility, with options being added incrementally over time to add what was needed at the moment. Though that's just my guess.
Yes, I am not opposed to ffmpeg wrappers in and of themselves. Some decent ffmpeg wrappers definitely exist. But I argue in my comment above that this specific tool does not have better QoL - again, since it reencodes unconditionally with quality settings that are usually not configurable.
It's incredible what lengths people go to to avoid memorizing basic ffmpeg usage. It's really not that hard, and the (F.) manual explains the basic concepts fairly well.
Now, granted, ffmpeg's defaults (reencoding by default and only keeping one stream of each type unless otherwise specified) aren't great, which can create some footguns, but as long as you remember to pass `-c copy` by default you should be fine.
Also, hiding those footguns is likely to create more harm than it fixes. Case in point: "ff convert video.mkv to mp4" (an extremely common usecase) maps to `ffmpeg -i video.mkv -y video.mp4` here, which does a full reencode (losing quality and wasting time) for what can usually just be a simple remux.
Similarly, "ffmpeg extract audio from video.mp4" will unconditionally reencode the audio to mp3, again losing quality. The quality settings are also hardcoded and hidden from the user.
I can sympathize with ffmpeg syntax looking complicated at first glance, but the main reason for this is just that multimedia is really complicated and that some of this complexity is necessary in order to not make stupid mistakes that lose quality or waste CPU resources. I truly believe that these ffmpeg wrappers that try to make it seem overly simple (at least when it's this simple, i.e. not even exposing quality settings or differentiating between reencoding and remuxing) are more hurtful than helpful. Not only can they give worse results, but by hiding this complexity from users they also give users the wrong ideas about how multimedia works. "Abstractions" like this are exactly how beliefs like "resolution and quality are the same thing" come to be. I believe the way to go should be educating users about video formats and proper ffmpeg usage (e.g. with good cheat sheets), not by hiding complexity that really should not be hidden.
Edit: Reading through my comment again, I have to apologize for the slightly facetious opening statement, even if I quality it later on. The fact that so many ffmpeg wrappers exists is saying something about its apparent difficulty, but as I argue above, a) there are reasons for this (namely, multimedia itself just being complicated), and b) I believe there are good and bad ways to "fix" this, with oversimplified wrappers being more on the "bad" side.
Setting aside the various formatting problems and the LLM writing style, this just seems all kinds of wrong throughout.
> “Just lower the bitrate,” you say. Great idea. Now it’s 10Mbps of blocky garbage that’s still 30 seconds behind.
10Mbps should be way more than enough for a mostly static image with some scrolling text. (And 40Mbps are ridiculous.) This is very likely to be caused by bad encoding settings and/or a bad encoder.
> “What if we only send keyframes?”
The post goes on to explain how this does not work because some other component needs to see P-frames. If that is the case, just configure your encoder to have very short keyframe intervals.
> And the size! A 70% quality JPEG of a 1080p desktop is like 100-150KB. A single H.264 keyframe is 200-500KB.
A single H.264 keyframe can be whatever size you want, *depending on how you configure your encoder*, which was apparently never seriously attempted. Why are we badly reinventing MJPEG instead of configuring the tools we already have? Lower the bitrate and keyint, use a better encoder for higher quality, lower the frame rate if you need to. (If 10 fps JPEGs are acceptable, surely you should try 10 fps H.264 too?)
But all in all the main problem seems to be squeezing an entire video stream through a single TCP connection. There are plenty of existing solutions for this. For example, this article never mentions DASH, which is made for these exact purposes.