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Comment by qbow883 | Hacker News Reader

> Not really sure how else I was supposed to interpret your comment

Yes, that was a bit facetious of me, I apologize for that.

> What is so bad about the existence of this project?

Being very blunt: The fact that it reinforces the extremely common misconception that a) converting between containers like mkv and mp4 will always require reencoding and that b) there is a single way to reencode a video (hence suggesting that there is no "bad" way to reencode a video), seeing as next to no encoding settings are exposed.

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I get what you’re saying but at the end of the day you just need to think about how most people use a tool like this. They’re looking for a simple solution to some specific problem and then they’re likely never using it again. They don’t want to deal with a full-on NLE and iMovie or whatever they have stocked is not cutting it. It’s not worth getting bent out of shape about it ultimately. There are tons of people who use ffmpeg as intended in its original form and more or less understand everything that is going on. The reason we have so many wrappers and variations all centered around ffmpeg is because of how useful it is, so it’s clearly here to stay.

I personally use lossless cut more than ffmpeg in the terminal just because I don’t have to really think about it and it can do most of what I need, which is simply removing or attaching things together without re-encoding. I use it maybe once every month or two, because it’s just not something I need to use a ton, so it doesn’t make sense for me to get down and dirty with the original. Ultimately I get what I need and I’m happy!

You are overthinking this way too much, to the point that it is sounding like you are purposefully creating out-of-context problems to justify your way too long rant.

As the kids these days say: just take the L, man.

I completely disagree. The rant is a problem but the complaint about reencoding is quite valid.

It’s a classic “forest for the trees” scenario. The use case 90% of the time for these tools is “I have a format problem and I need something to solve it quickly.” Rarely do they care if it’s lossless or not.

Anyone who knows what lossless vs. lossy means and when it matters knows what tools to look for and what the limitations of each tool are.

The average person can easily understand "the copy looks worse when it could look identical". The issue is not even thinking to check.

And I bet most of them do care, even if it's not caring a lot.

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