Free software scares normal people

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”.

I actually think ffmpeg’s UI is simpler than Handbrake for those at all acquainted with the command line (i.e., for those who understand the concept of text-is-everything-everything-is-text). Handbrake shows you everything you can possibly fiddle with whether or not you plan on fiddling with it. Meanwhile ffmpeg hides everything, period, and you ask for specific features by typing them out. It's not great for discovery but once you get the hang of it, it is incredibly precise. One could imagine taking someone for whom Handbrake was too much and showing them “look, you just type `ffmpeg -i`, the input file, and the output file, and it does what you want”. I imagine for many people this would be a perfectly lovely interface.