6 ms·
If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more
by andreldm 11mo ago
If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more convenient than struggling with ffmpeg”.
- phoronixrly 11mo agoHandbrake's UI is in the uncanny valley for me -- too complicated for use by laymen, and way too limiting for use by people who know what they're doing...
- fellowniusmonk 11mo agoffmpeg with disposable or llm backed dnd interfaces. for certain types of tooling UIs should be cheap, disposable and task/worlflow specific.
- throwaway173738 11mo agoActually I think this is a killer use case for local LLMs. We could finally get back to asking the computer to do something without having to learn how to string 14 different commands together to do it.
- multjoy 11mo agoI’ve been computer touching since the mid eighties. Exactly what golden era of computing are you harking back to, and what are you doing that requires 14 different commands?
- throwaway173738 11mo agoLinux shells, and that was an exaggeration. The shell is about as general purpose as it gets, but it’s hard to know a priori how to do a certain use case. But if you can explain it in plain language the LLM can do that for you. And at that point maybe you don’t need a gui except to present and manipulate visual output of the shell.
- jraph 11mo agoThe last thing we want for a user-friendly interface is nondeterminism. Some procedure that works today must work tomorrow if it looks like you can repeat it. LLMs can't be the answer to this. And if you go to the lengths of making the llm deterministic, with tests and all, you might as well code the thing once and for all and not ship the local llm to the end user at all.
- fellowniusmonk 11mo agoSorry, I see how my post lacked sufficient clarity. The idea behind a cheap UI is not constant change, but that you have a shared engine and "app" per activity. The particular workflow/ui doesn't need to ever change, it's more of a app/brand per activity for non-power users. This is similar to how some apps historically (very roughly lotus notes springs to mind) are a single app but have an email interface/icon to click, or contacts, or calendar, all one underlying app but different ui entry points.
- dfxm12 11mo agoMy dad, a total layman, was able to use handbrake as a step in digitizing old family video tapes. I think in the context of this thread, we shouldn't overgeneralize or underestimate "normal people".
- phoronixrly 11mo agoWas he able to use it correctly though to be able to digitize video with exacltly the correct setttings so that no notable loss of quality was introduced? How long did it take him to randomly test settings?
- sharperguy 11mo agoA "normal person" is just someone whose time and mental energy are focused on something other than the niche task your app is aiming to solve. With enough time and focus, anyone can figure out any interface. But for many, something which requires a smaller investment to achieve the results they need is preferrable.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoAlso, even the most arcane and convoluted interfaces become usable with repetition. Normal people learn the most bureaucratic business workflows and fly through them if that is their job. Then if you dare to "improve" any aspect of it you will hear them complain that you "broke" their system.
- sharperguy 11mo agoWell yes you force them to find other workarounds because their current workaround are no longer relevant. Because no system will ever fit everyones usecase.
- whimsicalism 11mo agoimo LLMs make all of these UIs unnecessary, i'm happy to use ffmpeg now
- MarkusWandel 11mo agoAt least with ffmpeg, for 99% of use cases you can just google "how do I do X with ffmpeg" and get a copypasta command line. Whereas with complicated GUI tools, you have to watch a video to learn how to do it.
- nicce 11mo agoOne of the things LLM shines. For double checking the command explanations, I ask commands to grep the sections from manual instead of relying LLM output blindly.
- xnx 11mo agoExcellent point. Soon computer use AI agents will bridge this gap.
- left-struck 11mo agoI think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual, and especially so if you’re coming back to a task you haven’t done in a while. With CLI I constantly have to google or ask an LLM about commands I’ve done many times, whereas with a gui if I do it once I can more easily find my way the next time. Anyway both have their place
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> I think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual Well, there are different issues. Reading a manual is the best you can do, theoretically. But Linux CLI tools have terrible manuals. I read over the ssh man page multiple times looking for functionality that was available. But the man page failed to make that clear. I had to learn about it from random tutorials instead. I've been reading lvm documentation recently and it shows some bizarre patterns. Stuff like "for more on this see [related man page]", where [related man page] doesn't have any "more on this". Or, here's what happens if you try to get CLI help: 1. You say `pvs --help`, and get a summary of what flags you can provide to the tool. The big one is -o, documented as `[ -o|--options String ]`. The String defines the information you want. All you have to do is provide the right "options" and you're good. What are they? Well, the --help output ends with this: "Use --longhelp to show all options and advanced commands." 2. Invoke --longhelp and you get nothing about options or advanced commands, although you do get some documentation about the syntax of referring to volumes. 3. Check the man page, and the options aren't there either. Buried inside the documentation for -o is the following sentence: "Use -o help to view the list of all available fields." 4. Back to the command line. `pvs -o help` actually will provide the relevant documentation. Reading a manual would be fine... if it actually contained the information it was supposed to, arranged in some kind of logically-organized structure. Instead, information on any given topic is spread out across several different types of documentation, with broken cross-references and suggestions that you should try doing the wrong thing. I'm picking on man pages here, but actually Microsoft's official documentation for their various .NET stuff has the same problem at least as badly.
- pxc 11mo agoYes. It's been a few years since I regularly used Handbrake, but I remember thinking of it as very simple, especially with its presets-based workflow. I was used to stuff like various CLI tools, mkvmerge and its GUI, and avidemux at that time. It struck me as a weird example in the OP because I don't really think of Handbrake as a power user tool.
- soraminazuki 11mo agoIf you only care about converting media without tweaking anything, ffmpeg offers the simplest UI ever. ffmpeg -i input.avi output.mp4
- a_shovel 11mo agoProposing a CLI command as a candidate for "simplest UI ever" is a great gag.
- ekjhgkejhgk 11mo agoCome on. "type ffmpeg, then hyphen i then the input filename then the output filename". I would've understood this when I was 8. Because I was super smart? No, because I was making a genuine effort.
- pwg 11mo agoThe portion you've overlooked is there is an entire population of users out there who have never seen, nor used, a command line, and telling them to "just type this out" ignores all the background command line knowledge necessary to successfully "just type this out": 1) They have to know how to get to a command line somewhere/how (most of this group of users would be stymied right here and get no further along); 2) They now have to change the current directory of their CLI that they did get open to the location in their filesystem where the video is actually stored (for the tiny sliver who get past #1 above, this will stymie most of them, as they have no idea exactly where on disk their "Downloads" [or other meta-directory item] is actually located); 3) For the very few who actually get to this step, unless they already have ffmpeg installed on their PATH, they will get a command not found error after typing the command, ending their progress unless they now go and install ffmpeg; 4) For the very very few who would make it here, almost all of them will now have to accurately type out every character in "a-really_big_filename with spaces .mov", as they will not know anything about filename completion to let the shell do this for them. And if the filename does have spaces, and many will, they now need to somehow know 4a) that they have to escape the spaces and 4b) how to go about escaping the spaces, or they will instead get some ffmpeg error (hopefully just 'file not found', but with the extra parameters that unescaped spaces will create, it might just be a variant of "unknown option switch" error instead).
- bobbylarrybobby 11mo agoI actually think ffmpeg’s UI is simpler than Handbrake for those at all acquainted with the command line (i.e., for those who understand the concept of text-is-everything-everything-is-text). Handbrake shows you everything you can possibly fiddle with whether or not you plan on fiddling with it. Meanwhile ffmpeg hides everything, period, and you ask for specific features by typing them out. It's not great for discovery but once you get the hang of it, it is incredibly precise. One could imagine taking someone for whom Handbrake was too much and showing them “look, you just type `ffmpeg -i`, the input file, and the output file, and it does what you want”. I imagine for many people this would be a perfectly lovely interface.
- zahlman 11mo agoFFMpeg's command line is practically a programming language. Someone who only wants to convert from one format to another, and isn't accustomed to CLIs, is far better served by "drag the file here -> type an output filename and extension in the text box". The problem (and the reason both FFMpeg and Handbrake exist) is that tons of people "only" want to do two or three specific tasks, all in the same general wheelhouse, but with terrible overlap.
- gwbas1c 11mo agoIt's funny: "in my head," Handbrake and ffmpeg are two different tools, with very different purposes. Even though they "do the same thing," the context when I use one over the other is very different. Handbrake is easier in that I don't have to think too hard about how to use it; but that I think a lot more critically about the options that I choose. FFmpeg is easier when I go in knowing the exact options I want; often pulled from notes that I've stored away, or combined with scripts.
- threetonesun 11mo agoUsing ffmpeg to convert one file to another remains probably my main use of general LLM web searches. This isn't to say it does a good job with that, but it's still ahead of me.
- moffkalast 11mo agoJust like with regexes I've yet to get a wrong result by doing "give me an ffmpeg command that does this and this" with an LLM, with Handbrake I'm never quite sure what I'm doing, too many checkboxes and dropdowns with default values already filled in.