Not to criticize the guide, it's brilliant!
If asked for improvements, I'd suggest adding a table of contents.
Slightly off topic, but the guide does suggests reading time. It's interesting that people keep using read estimates for technical/scientific/professional documentation. This one says it's a 58 minute read. Not 1 hour, not 59 minutes, but spot on 58 minutes.
Now, I'm not a novice in using ffmpeg and I think I'm at least an average person. I can tell you that it would take me a _lot_ longer to read this guide in a meaningful manner.
But, a brilliant guide. I'm definitely going to use it to expand my ffmpeg knowledge.
There should be a table of contents at the beginning of the post. It's not very detailed, but expands as you scroll to each section.
I agree the reading time does not really convey too much useful info, the blogging platform is designed for simpler and shorter posts. Maybe a replacing it with a wordcount would be better.
One can simply look at the right-hand-side of their browser window and see the scrollbar height to gauge "accurately enough" whether it's long or short.
More to the point, I would expect anything purporting to be an "ultimate" guide to ffmpeg to be a massive time sink that simply can't (and shouldn't) be ingested in one sitting. It's either going to be incredibly dense or it's going to leave out innumerable details, leaving many things implicit. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with those approaches, but it means that "how long" it takes to read will depend on the reader and what they actually end up reading.
if (mins < 4) return "a couple of minutes"
if (mins < 8) return "five minutes"
if (mins < 12) return "ten minutes"
if (mins < 18) return "quarter of an hour"
if (mins < 25) return "20 minutes"
if (mins < 40) return "half an hour"
if (mins < 50) return "45 minutes"
if (mins < 70) return "about an hour"
if (mins < 100) return "hour and a half"
if (mins < 250) return "a couple of hours"
I wonder if that is a purposely value, trying to use the same psychology as Supermarkt prices, where they say "0.99" rather than ""1.00"?
In my opinion the right approach however is to have a clean layout, where my scrollbars gives me a good estimate on the length, so I can make my estimate based on my reading speed and experience. But yeah, ads and other stuff make that of course impossible.
I don't find it's pointless. Sure, in this particular case (a very long time for something meant to be very long) is probably, but a "3-min read" note have made me read lots of articles I typically won't.
And it's definitely better than "number of words" or "A4 pages", since I have no idea how fast average person reads.
Slightly off topic, but the guide does suggests reading time. It's interesting that people keep using read estimates for technical/scientific/professional documentation. This one says it's a 58 minute read. Not 1 hour, not 59 minutes, but spot on 58 minutes.
Now, I'm not a novice in using ffmpeg and I think I'm at least an average person. I can tell you that it would take me a _lot_ longer to read this guide in a meaningful manner.
But, a brilliant guide. I'm definitely going to use it to expand my ffmpeg knowledge.