Comment by ubercow13
Totally disagree, I have a wrapper I wrote myself for converting things, often for sharing the odd little clip online or such. It produces a complex command that is not easy to just type out, that does multiple things to maximise compatibility like
- making sure pixel are square while resizing if the video resolution is too large
("scale=w=if(gt(iw*sar\\,ih)\\,min(ceil(iw*sar/2)*2\\,{})\\,ceil(iw*sar*min(ih\\,{})/ih/2)*2):h=if(gt(ih\\,iw*sar)\\,min(ceil(ih/2)*2\\,{})\\,ceil(ih*min(iw*sar\\,{})/iw/sar/2)\*2):out_range=limited,zscale,setsar=1")
- setting this one tag on hevc files that macos needs for them to be recognised as hevc but isn't set by default
- calculating the target bitrate if I need a specific filesize and verifying the encode actually hit that size and retrying if not (doesn't always work first time with certain hardware encoders even if they have a target or max bitrate parameter)
- dealing with 2-pass encoding which is fiddly and requires two separate commands and the parameters are codec specific
- correctly activating hardware encoding for various codecs
- etc
And this is just for the basic task of "make this into a simple mp4"
Yes, absolutely. Multimedia is complicated.
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.