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Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

Same -- it's one of the first programs I install.

I wish the video conversion was simpler, more intuitive, and provided better feedback. My impression is you have to "stream" to convert a file, and then it just sort of happens without you knowing when it's done. And the settings are...odd. Selecting a framerate/resolution is still old school - provide some common defaults, or % choices to match the video's ratio. Very clunky. --- I just tried it and it keeps repeating itself trying to overwrite a file, had to force close it, though it did convert!

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Yeah, admittedly typically when I do video conversion, I use ffmpeg nowadays, just because I am comfortable enough with the command line and it's easier to script.

That said, whenever my dad needs my help with any video stuff, trying to talk him through ffmpeg command line args is tricky, and while VLC's interface is a bit weird, I've managed to talk him through how to use it. It's not ideal, but considering that it's free, works, and supports basically every format imaginable, we forgive it...certainly better than when I was using AutoGordianKnot as a teenager :).

handbrake is also pretty great from a user-friendly point of view :)

Handbrake is great, though IIRC it doesn't encode into any weird formats. For reasons too annoying to go into here, we needed to convert some weird Intel Indeo file into a WMV/ASF, due to some weirdness of a program that he needed to use for work only supporting WMV stuff.

Handbreak is just a ffmpeg gui right?

not anymore, it also uses x264, x265, libdav1d, etc.. and it's probably one of the most used net5.0-windows wpf project. (the gui is written in wpf) (Full Lib List: https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/tree/master/contrib)

Reminds my of a program called Super that did video transcoding back in the day. It worked decent but the download site was the worst I have ever used even to this day.

Oh man, i remember that. What a weird site. As if they didn't want you to download their program

I used to always use VirtualDub to convert video. It was my goto video editor. It was created and maintained by a solo dev. Whatever happened to them?

It doesn't seem to work with mp4 or mkv containers out of the box. I tried it recently to deshake a video and it was quite frustrating to use, although I managed to do it in the end.

VirtualDub was awesome, and I used it a _lot_, but it seems like it's been pretty dead for about 8 years or more.

If you do a lot of conversions - you might want to look up Handbrake - it has a more intuitive interface, but uses FFMpeg under the hood (another project managed by VLC folk that is world-changing by itself. It's almost impossible to find a video-related software system that doesn't have ffmpeg at its core, commercial or open source)

The FFmpeg repo is hosted by VLC but isn't managed by them.

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