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What you need to know before touching a video file

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Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#111

Post by eviks »

> I would recommend you to just learn basic ffmpeg usage instead > but ffmpeg is fine for beginners

No, that's just nonsense for any guide targetting beginners, it's not fine, it's too error-prone and complicated and requires entering the whole unfriendly land of the cli!

> If you must use a GUI

Of course you must! It's much better to provide beginners with your presets in Handbrake that avoid the footguns you mention (or teach them how to avoid them on their own) rather than ask them to descend into the dark pit of ffmpeg "basics"

> Before you start complaining about how complicated ffmpeg is and how arcane its syntax is, do yourself a favor and read the start of its documentation. It turns out that reading the (f.) manual actually helps a lot!

It turns out that wrapping the bad UI in a simpler typed GUI interface wastes less of the collective time than asking everyone to read dozens of pages of documentation!

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#112

Post by buzer »

I would disagree somewhat on his stance that video quality is not affected by container format (especially on part "Here is a list of things that people commonly associate with a video's quality"). Different container formats have different limitations regarding what video (and audio) formats they support. And while it subtitles support doesn't directly affect video quality, it does do so indirectly. If you cannot add subtitles without hardsubbing or subtitle formats are so limited that you end up needing hardsubbing anyway then the choice of the container format ends up affecting the video quality.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#113

Post by zenmac »

ffsm8 wrote: post #66
Etheryte wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, very hard to take the rest of it seriously after the VLC bit. VLC has literally never left me hanging, across I don't know how many decades. It's gonna take more than a trust me bro to challenge that.

You're talking about VLC for video playback, TFA is taking about video editing. VLC ignores a lot for it's outstanding video playback support, which is great if you want the playback too just work... But that's the player perspective, not the editing/encoding

The author did mention to use MPV, which is much much lightweight than VLC. Being using it as default for quite some times now.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#114

Post by ffsm8 »

eviks wrote: post #110
ffsm8 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about VLC for video playback, TFA is taking about video editing. VLC ignores a lot for it's outstanding video playback support, which is great if you want the playback too just work... But that's the player perspective, not the editing/encoding

what are you talking about? Of course it's only about playback just like the other 2 alternatives > single best media player out there ... VLC is not recommended.

Literally the first sentence

> Hanging out in subtitling and video re-editing communities, I see my fair share of novice video editors and video encoders, and see plenty of them make the classic beginner mistakes when it comes to working with videos.

Seriously, you quoted pretty much the only sentence in the whole article that's about plain playback, and even in that bullet point, the following sentence mentions hardcoding subtitles.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#115

Post by aiahs »

perching_aix wrote: post #44
jlarocco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never had problems with VLC, and I've used it off and on for 20 years. I don't doubt that there's some obscure, elite videophile hate towards it, but I'm hardly going to stop using it because a few random internet strangers hate on it.

Kinda the problem with anecdotes isn't it? :) My own anecdotal experience with VLC was that while every update fixed something, they also broke something in return - and these updates were common. This got annoying enough at some point for me to hop ships, and so I switched to mpc-hc and never looked back. I've since also tried (and keep trying) the to-me still newfangled mpv, but I'm not a fan of the GUI or the keyb…

Out of pure curiosity, what kind of things were you VLC using for, for it to break so often? I'm almost never doing anything with video, so I'm completely clueless in this field.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#116

Post by Drybones »

Nearly this entire HN comment section is upset about VLC being mentioned once and not recommended. If you can not understand why this very minor (but loud?) note was made, then you probably do not do any serious video encoding or you would know why it sucks today and is well past its prime. VLC is glorified because it was a video player that used to be amazing back in the day, but hasn't been for several years now. It is the Firefox of media players.

There is a reason why the Anime community has collectively has ditched VLC in favor of MPV and MPC-HC. Color reproduction, modern codec support, ASS subtitle rendering, and even audio codecs are janky or even broken on VLC. 98% of all Anime encode release playback problems are caused by the user using VLC.

We even have a dedicated pastebin on a quick run down of what is wrong: https://rentry.co/vee-ell-cee

And this pastebin doesn't even have all the issues. VLC has a long standing issue of not playing back 5.1 Surround sound Opus correctly or at all. VLC is still using FFmpeg 4.x. We're on FFmpeg 8.x these days

I can not even use VLC to take screenshots of videos I encode because the color rendering on everything is wrong. BT.709 is very much NOT new and predates VLC itself.

And you can say "VLC is easy to install and the UI is easy." Yeah so is IINA for macOS, Celluloid for Linux, and MPV.net for Windows which all use MPV underneath. Other better and easy video players exist today.

We are not in 2012 anymore. We are no longer just using AVC/H264 + AAC or AC-3 (Dolby Audio) MP4s for every video. We are playing back HEVC, VP9, and AV1 with HDR metadata in MKV/webm cnotainers with audio codecs like Opus or HE-AACv3 or TrueHD in surround channels, BT.2020 colorspaces. VLC's current release is made of libraries and FFmpeg versions that predate some of these codecs/formats/metadata types. Even the VLC 4.0 nightly alpha is not keeping up. 4.0 is several years late to releasing and when it does, it may not even matter.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#117

Post by my65thaccount »

rfl890 wrote: post #99
Etheryte wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, very hard to take the rest of it seriously after the VLC bit. VLC has literally never left me hanging, across I don't know how many decades. It's gonna take more than a trust me bro to challenge that.

VLC has always caused problems for me when seeking backwards (graphical glitches). mpv has never caused any issues in this regard.

VLC and mpv literally use the same underlying codec library. (As well as ffmpeg.)

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#118

Post by eduction »

embedding-shape wrote: post #9

It seems really weirdly written. It's written with a lot of authority, like saying "Don't use VLC" and "Don't use Y" yet provides no reasoning for those things. Just putting "Trust me, just don't" doesn't suddenly mean I trust the author more, it probably has the opposite effect. Some sections seem to differ based on if the reader knows/doesn't know something, but I thought the article was supposed to be for the latt…

And? It’s a GitHub gist not an oreilly book. Context.

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#119

Post by zzo38computer »

Sometimes I would want to convert from MPEG-TS H.264 to DVD video format, or other conversions, so there are reasons to do so. However, once I had got desynchronized audio, and I don't know if that is because of the original source, because of the conversion, or because some segments have not been recorded. (Also, it could not retain the EIA-608 captions, but that seems to be a limitation with FFmpeg, rather than something I did.)

Re: What you need to know before touching a video file

#120

Post by zzo38computer »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #54
pandemic_region wrote: post #18

Could have used this in the nineties, where hunting a specific codec to play that video you downloaded off a BBS was an actual thing.

Oh man it extended well past the 90’s. Finding some weird windows video codec in a dodgy .ru domain was a time honored tradition for quite some time. I remember all the weird repackaged video codec installers that put mystery goo all over them machine. The article bashes VLC but I tell you what… VLC plays just about everything you feed it without complaint. Even horribly corrupt files it will attempt to handle. It mi…

I had found that VLC does not play a MPEG-TS file very well (although it recognizes the file and plays it, it does not work very well); converting it to another format first, will cause it to play better, in my experience.
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