I am certain that a non-technical person would not be able to come up with that command line.
As such, I think there is a lot of room for improvement.
The ffmpeg community caters to a technical audience, specifically one with somewhat advanced media knowledge.
I am happy that ffmpeg exists, but it's
not a high quality program (e.g. security vulnerabilities exist)
not made to cater to the masses (one could argue even VLC isn't, other than for its functionality for video playback)
not documented (example: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavcodec/aac_parser.c has no comments explaining the details of what it is supposed to be doing, which is counter to what one learns in university regarding how to properly program). ffmpeg seems to be just a code dump of someone and all the knowledge required to efficiently modify the program is distributed in the heads of its authors, which makes it a amateuristic endeavour (it might be the best in the world, but that's independent of the qualification regarding quality). (Good open-source programs exist, but popular software almost never is, because large good programs are basically a fairy tale. )
not documented (example: https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavcodec/aac_parser.c has no comments explaining the details of what it is supposed to be doing, which is counter to what one learns in university regarding how to properly program).
That code is fairly self-explanatory, and why would you be touching a codec without having read the specification?
I’ve seen undocumented codec/plugin/etc code more often than not being obfuscated code originally stolen or simply secretive to avoid lawsuits and to make the tech all dependent on a couple of devs
linux_needs_a_home@reddit
I am certain that a non-technical person would not be able to come up with that command line.
As such, I think there is a lot of room for improvement.
The ffmpeg community caters to a technical audience, specifically one with somewhat advanced media knowledge.
I am happy that ffmpeg exists, but it's
Razakel@reddit
That code is fairly self-explanatory, and why would you be touching a codec without having read the specification?
beardmohawk@reddit
Is the spec enough to map to each code variable? this is not an honest reply!
beardmohawk@reddit
I’ve seen undocumented codec/plugin/etc code more often than not being obfuscated code originally stolen or simply secretive to avoid lawsuits and to make the tech all dependent on a couple of devs