| User review:
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Apropos my earlier post... About 10 minutes after making a generally complimentary post, I discovered that the one criticism I had of this product was in error. I tried to post a correction, unfortunately, this website would not allow me to post the correction for 24 hours. So here it is, along with some more details on editing presets:
In fact WinFF provides the ability to fine-tune the conversion profiles and save different variations of the defaults under custom names (very helpful). However, that feature is separate from the 'Additional Options' tabbed dialog, which at first glance appears to be the place to go in order to fine-tune the conversion presets. Intuitively, I would have expected an 'edit' or 'advanced' settings tab in that same context. Eventually I found this feature under a generic 'Edit' menu, which is perfectly okay with me.
However, it is confusing to see (for example) a blank box for 'Video Bitrate' when the selected preset has already provided a '-b' command line value for that parameter. Even more confusing, a blank input field for 'Additional Command Line Parameters' without showing the current command line. I tried entering an alternative setting into this field, and it was appended, rather than replacing the original value. So when I looked at the command line preview, it appeared at first glance to have ignored my modification.
WinFF is a very useful program, and given the complexity of ffmpeg, it would be quite a bit of additional work to try and provide input fields for all the possible variations. There is an option 'Display CMD Line' which purportedly shows the final ffmpeg command line, but for some reason, it wouldn't allow me to actually approve the command line and launch the conversion process. I had to hit OK, then go back and turn off the 'Display CMD Line' option, then hit 'Convert' again. So maybe a more accurate designation would be: 'Preview CMD Line'. One easy way to improve that situation might be to simply allow the user to edit the command line en-passante as part of that step, and provide 'CONVERT' and 'CANCEL' options as the exit options for the dialog.
Bottom line, all my prior '7' ratings are now '8'. This is a very helpful front end to a very valuable conversion program (ffmpeg). |
