If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more convenient than struggling with ffmpeg”.
This is an interesting position because that's only simple if you already know it. From the perspective of discoverability, it's literally the worst possible UI, because a string of that length has, say, 30^30 possible combinations, among which only one will produce the desired effect, and a bash prompt gives you no indication of how to arrive at that string.