Redesign the User Interface

Zitat von Vouk

I am open for suggestions and concepts that satisfy the needs of users with less encoding knowledge and pro users that want to optimize each single option.

You should simplify current UI.

First of all make a choice on using sidebar with icons or tabs in main window. Using both is a mistake. Choose the one and solid concept. I prefer sidebar with icons. It still allow to use tabs for chosen section in sidebar.

Examples:

Wrong: Icon General, tabs General and About.

Correct: Icon General and icon About.

Wrong: Icon Settings, tabs Settings and Logfile.

Correct: Icon Settings and icon Logfile.

Secondly, split General -> General to 3 icons - video, audio, muxer/format (or misc or other or etc.).

Third, on Video icon make 2 or more tabs. But at least two: Encoding options and Side data (3D).

Fourth, choose a concept for basic and advanced user. Variants:

- wizard;

- simple/advanced UI;

- provide profiles based on original video bitrate, like output with high/medium/low bitrate;

- leave it as is, but provide hints and descriptions which will help user to study and choose the right options.

For any variant you will be responsible and still it will require a lot of support. Encoding options vary on many things and it can be changed in new version of Voukoder, but it will break backward compatibly. This will lead to a lot of questions like "why it works here, but in new version does not".

Additionally:

- remember the size of resizable window (at least in session)

- split long video grid with options to multiple tabs (lke general (preset, profile, level, ...), rate control, analysis, etc.)

- more fundamental change: remove grid at all. Nobody likes to scroll.

A long time ago I developed an app called ASXGui which was an x264 gui that could be as simple or as complex as the user needed it to be. You could simply drag, drop, and encode if you knew nothing about encoders. If you knew a little, there were some basic filters and codec options, and if you were a power user, there was the ability to tweak every little setting you might want to do. Maybe that app could give you some basic ideas you could build on. This was the last version I released, 10 years ago:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/asxgui/files/asxgui/2.5/

You might need to run as administrator for it to work.

The actually used UI is still good but not perfect. The codec configuration could be better. I make my set of options and save this as named preset like "VK2 nV HEVC@M10-HL5.1 2160p25 15-30MBit VBR+AC3 2.0 192kBit". You can drag&drop this in AME over the project files or choose this from the project line. After that you can modify special parameters like the bitrate.

I think there is something out there what could be treated as good: The codec configuration of "MeGUI". For x264 there are 5 Tabs. Only in case of a checked "advanced settings" the 4 last tabs will appear.

Something like that?

Zitat von Vouk

Property grid vs. standard controls vs. custom controls (what should each cutsom control look like?)

As for me, property grid is fine, but until it does not have scroll. Grid is quite simple for development and for user too.

Zitat von Vouk

How to display a simple view with limited option set and an advanced view with all options

A lot of ideas already exists in other software. The first thing that came to mind is VLC. Switch of the mode at bottom left.

Here are some screenshots from a slightly more modern rewrite I was working on before I abandoned the project. This is the window that would open only if the user wanted to modify settings. The "other" tab at this point only included subtitles. The source tab was for adjusting preprocessing and adding audio tracks. The advanced tab would include every possible x264 setting. In the older version I actually hid the advanced settings behind another window. There were also built in presets for different devices and quality settings if people didn't want to mess with any of these settings at all.

I think there were probably still some things I could have done to improve this design, but the basic idea was that things could be as simple or as advanced as the user needed, and this worked pretty well from the feedback I got at the time.

I like the interface just as it is now

Maybe it would be useful to create an extra icon below "General" for "Filters" because its huge amount of items and its fact that it is not a general setting. Furthermore many users don't need filters I think and they have a better overview in the general tab.

I would group encoder options and presets together on the same page. Make sure the most basic settings are displayed first, such as bitrate/crf, and then the further down they go, the more advanced it gets. You could separate out the most advanced stuff into an additional tab if you want, but that may or may not be necessary as long as the more basic stuff is seen first. Perhaps hide the more advanced stuff away in a collapsable panel that is collapsed by default, and only opens if the user is interested in making those tweaks. Something like this

I would also probably have Voukoder remember whether they opened the advanced panel or left it closed.

Yes, something like this would taste good...

Especially the filters are a good idea: FFMPEG can do a lot of filtering, especially the resize is important. AME can resize the Picture (ex.: from 2160p to 720p) but the result is always looking quite soft because of the (bicubic?) resize algorithm. If there would be an option to let FFMPEG do the resize, ther would be more Option (bicubic, blackman, ...).

But the filter-tab should be presented as the 2nd from top: General (codecs, multiplexer, external files to multiplex), filters, video, audio.

You could probably include the filters within the video and audio tabs. I would probably recommend having them appear before the advanced codec settings if so. Are there a lot of filters that can be chained together, or just a few basic things? If it's fairly basic like resize/crop, I'd just put them in a panel on the same page with checkboxes to activate them, but if there's a lot of complexity with them, maybe linking to a separate window with a button might be a better option. If they're multi-path node like filters, then something like virtualdub used to do would be a good design, but if they're just layered on top of each other, then something like Avidemux does would be good.

Oh yeah you could probably include that on the same page as the video settings without making things too complicated.

Maybe something like that?