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I haven't downloaded this so I can't tell if he has succeeded, but charging for a good user experience on top of a open-source library is a pretty classic thing.
Turns out not everyone wants to spend years learning *nix and sit on a desktop pc debugging shell commands to edit their video.
I doubt that people who are capable of using ffmpeg are the target group here.
Actually ran into a random issue before where the first result for "convert video to MP4 with ffmpeg" would produce files not playable by Quicktime on Mac, you needed to pass in some other codec argument to make it work. So even ffmpeg is not a panacea for technical folks.
Additionally this take is just incorrect. If you scroll down the landing page to "Super simple video editor" you'll see it has cool features where a GUI shines, like cropping a video to a specific section while scrubbing through it. Good look using ffmpeg to do that.
My advice to OP is to make those GUI features more prominent in the landing page compared to "converting videos" -- I think most social media apps will accept the common video formats created by most phones so that's probably more niche than some of the editing stuff.
MP4 files use the MPEG-4 container format. It’s confusing at first why a .mp4 file would play somewhere and elsewhere not, until one looks into the difference of a container format and a video codec. After one learns that, one will be in a better position to find the right arguments to use for ffmpeg to produce a video file that is playable on some of one’s own different devices.
For me, to host videos on my website, I found it better to offload the task of converting formats to a self hosted PeerTube instance, rather than keeping scripts to transcode to multiple formats with different parameters on my own. I believe PeerTube also uses ffmpeg for this.
In any event, it's unexpected that the default configuration of ffmpeg produces an MP4 unplayable on Mac. Looks like "pix_fmt yuv420p" is what's needed.
Side note I'm remembering now why I needed to do this, some dev tooling produces WebP video files which can't be uploaded everywhere.
Every piece of software is providing an abstraction for libraries. Unless you're sitting there pushing raw machine code, you're just being an annoying hypocrite.
The whole thing was a simple PHP script invoking imagemagick. They made it available over an API.
Sold it to eBay for more than $1M.
AWS is just a wrapper around KVM.