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Comment by pjerem | Hacker News Reader

I have hard time thinking of a real use case of this but ... it's really clever.

I'm very much a command line guy but ffmpeg still stumps me. Might be nice if it could save the various ffmpeg arg soups as some kind of friendly name, e.g. "combine jpegs into a timelapse" or "convert video to HTML5-friendly format" and then just drop-down and fill in the timelapse parameters or whatever.

I don't use it myself, but maybe have a look at Staxrip? It's not quite that user friendly, but a lot more than remembering the commands for making a video from individual images.

I also like to use the command line, but I hate that flags are inconsistent, case sensitive (with unrelated meaning) and not good discoverable

I personally have no desire to use it outside of Windows, but Powershell fixes all there things if you're so inclined:

> flags are inconsistent

At least among the core command set, there is a set of "core flags" like -ErrorAction or -Verbose that are consistent. Though I don't know how often you'll find them in third-party commands.

> case sensitive

There's a preferred case that you'll get if you tab complete, but -Verbose is -VERBOSE is -VERBOSE.

> not good discoverable

Tab completion works for flags everywhere and each of them should be included in Get-Help regardless of if the author documents them.

Handbrake is great for transcoding! Not sure if it can do the more esoteric tasks.

FFmpeg was the first example I thought of too, but I don't think that there is a screen large enough to display all it's options and flags.

I just have a folder with a bunch of scripts with various descriptive names which launch ffmpeg with different painstakingly composed argument chains. I could join them into a mega-script which would prompt me upon execution but I don't see the point in an additional indirection.

Sometimes one script is just not enough/not convenient enough, and I write simple helper wrappers such as:

- https://indiscipline.github.io/post/movie-thumbnailer-announ...

- https://indiscipline.github.io/post/ffmpeg-loudnorm-helper-a...

If you want to see an example of that exact thing, I've got a small suite of wrapped FFMPEG tools doing exactly that via Gooey. Having things like screen recording, gif creation, trimming/truncating in a GUI just makes them way more convenient for my frail brain compared to FFMPEG's tough APIs.

[0]https://github.com/chriskiehl/GooeyVideo

Plenty of options, one I haven’t seen mentioned is Shutter Encoder. I don’t think it covers all of ffmpeg functionality, it focuses on format conversions useful for video professionals and does a fine job of it.

https://www.shutterencoder.com/en/

Not everybody feels native to the terminal, so this could ease the use for non-tech-savvy users

If you made a nice script and people pester you for a GUI now, this looks like a nice low-effort way to satisfy them.

Really!? Try teaching your parents to use a command line.

My parents taught me how to use the command line.

Try teaching 10 randomly sampled parents how to use a command line?

10 randomly sampled adults, nevermind parents. My partner is an educated person who works on a computer all day and I think she would have a panic attack if I asked her to do something on a command prompt

I've been using CLIs for many years and I'd still rather use a (well-designed) GUI most of the time.

You're very young and the exception pal.

What are the tools my "non command line fluent parents" could/would want to use that don't already have a human crafted GUI ? This lib, as smart as I think it is, doesn't create "simplicity" from a void.

Never in the last two decades did I encountered a "parents" usage where any CLI tool were needed to do some work. Yes it did happen that I had to use them to repair things. But having auto-generated GUIs on these tools wouldn't change anything about the lack of understanding of what it is, why it's needed and what it does.

If we are talking about generating GUIs for complex production tools like ffmpeg, tar, git ... there already are plenty of wonderful and less wonderful frontends that a auto generated GUI could never beat.

But I'm not saying this tool is not nice. Just I think it's targeted at power users that don't want to open a terminal. It's not a lot, but it's something.

The way I would use it is for porting scripts used in a work environment to a GUI so my non-programmer coworkers can use them too.

> GUIs for complex production tools like ffmpeg, tar, git ... there already are plenty of wonderful and less wonderful frontends that a auto generated GUI could never beat.

My 12 year old is doing a fair bit of video work, and I just pointed him at Handbrake to get his submission file size down. It's an amazing bit of software, apart from that malware issue back in 2017...

I've been in a situation where I needed to share a configurable Python script with a non-technical person. This would've made that much easier.

That's a really cool use case I haven't anticipated :)

How about a tool like catt (cast all the things)?

catt lets you Chromecast direct from your local machine, which could be of interest to non-techies, but catt only ships with a command-line interface. (Although I believe an unofficial GUI exists that doesn't use Gooey.)

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