Erightsoft: web site wtf horror exemplified



  • GAHHHH!!!!

    So, I want to grab a copy of SUPER, a (unfortunately) useful video converter. You search, and you get:

    http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html#Dnload

    Now, ladies and gentlemen, try to find a way to download the fucking program! Scroll through dozens and dozens of pages of features and instructions in tiny text! Follow link after link! Find out that it's so goddamned obtuse that the web site author actually had to WRITE A HELP FILE SO PEOPLE COULD FIND OUT HOW TO DOWNLOAD HIS OWN APPLICATION! And then find out that he makes the link *DISAPPEAR* without any sign or error if your browser disables referrers, has anything (?) in its cache, or doesn't have javascript enabled! What the FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, ERIGHTSOFT!?!?!?!?!!! You miserable, cock-chugging motherfucker! Why do you HATE YOUR USERS!?%%

     

    AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

     

    Finally, after digging around in FireFox for some way to flush the cache (apparently a WTF in itself, because a 5-minute search yielded nothing), I had to go to the site in IE - and after again failing to navigate his idiot-maze, managed to finally find the link buried amongst hundreds of k of brightly colored text.

    If you go to the root erightsoft page, you get an even greater litany of failure - a grid with his programs showing screenshots... which when clicked, only show the screenshot, and don't link to a page about the software! And not only that, the text ABOVE with the applications' names doesn't link there EITHER! You have to scroll down (you'd think this guy got paid cash every time someone scrolled on his web site) to find more plaintext links in no particular order.

    Then when you actually GET the app, you find a user interface which is only marginally less obtuse than his fucking useless web site - aside from its complete and utter nonconformity (eg, ALL options are accessed from an enormous, garishy-colored dropdown menu which appears with a right click), it has a ton of wonderful features, like starting in the center of the screen. That'd be OK, if it didn't RESET TO THE CENTER OF THE SCREEN WHENEVER YOU PERFORM AN OPERATION! Want to put it off to the side to see an explorer window? FUCK YOU, USER, ERIGHTSOFT KNOWS BEST!

    The horrible, horrible thing is, it's the only reasonably functioning and most flexible video converter out there, so despite everything, it's the best way to get the job done. It's like if only one person made a car that worked, except you had to go through a harry potter-style hell maze to get to it and then you had to sit on a hot pink bicycle seat and the car steered back into the center of the road whenever you adjusted the radio.

     

    FUCK YOU, ERIGHTSOFT! GOD DAMNIT!

     

     

     

     

    ...I'm going to be OK.



  • @PeriSoft said:

    Finally, after digging around in FireFox for some way to flush the cache (apparently a WTF in itself, because a 5-minute search yielded nothing)

    Fail. Tools, Clear recent history. Select what you want to clear from the Details and the timeframe and away you go

    @PeriSoft said:

    The horrible, horrible thing is, it's the only reasonably functioning and most flexible video converter out there, so despite everything, it's the best way to get the job done

    I just use ffmpeg, but I like the CLI :)



  • @Zemm said:

    @PeriSoft said:
    Finally, after digging around in FireFox for some way to flush the cache (apparently a WTF in itself, because a 5-minute search yielded nothing)

    Fail. Tools, Clear recent history. Select what you want to clear from the Details and the timeframe and away you go

    The point is that I couldn't find it quickly, not that it isn't easy to get to once you know where it is. I may not be a unix admin, but I'm pretty experienced - so if the UI isn't clear enough for me to find something like clearing the cache, that seems to be a fail. When I see 'clear history', I think, 'clear the history of sites I've visited', not 'clear history, and also do some related stuff that's hidden in another dialog underneath'.

    @PeriSoft said:
    The horrible, horrible thing is, it's the only reasonably functioning and most flexible video converter out there, so despite everything, it's the best way to get the job done

    I just use ffmpeg, but I like the CLI :)

     

    Yeah; unfortunately I don't do this stuff enough to memorize CLI invocations, so I'm either stuck with a GUI or I have to learn the command options every time. Though, given the end result, it might have been quicker to brush up on my C, learn compression algorithms, and write my own transcoder from scratch...

    The coup de grace, (coup de fail?) however, is that SUPER spent an hour transcoding from H.264 to raw frames, and spit out a 1.3mb AVI which does nothing - thus adding another two fails, its functionality and my own trust, to the list. It's a whole fucking day of fail.



  • SUPER is a pile of unusable buggy garbage.  There are a gajillion better GUIs, and of course you can just go and use the libraries directly via the commandline.

    A tiny selection of better (free) GUI applications:

    Handbrake
    Staxrip
    Ripbot264
    HDConvertToX
    Avidemux
    MeGUI
    AutoMen
    ASXGui

    And CLI:

    x264
    ffmpeg
    mencoder
    handbrake-cli

    Keep in mind that nearly every single freeware H.264 encoder in the entire world uses x264 with about half a dozen exceptions total, so they're all using the same encoding library anyways.





  • Being a CLI affectionado myself, I do get annoyed rather quickly with badly done gui's (and do not consider GIMP at all difficult - there's something philisophically deep in there, I'm sure.)

    i just expect everything to be made clear by typing "man commandname". And poking around in a gui trying to find the right area to click which will fandozle the whatzit which will, as an obscure side effect, do what I actually want: Well, just why do I have to adjust the planet with this 40-foot pole?

     

    I to, will be all right.



  • @PeriSoft said:

    @Zemm said:

    @PeriSoft said:
    Finally, after digging around in FireFox for some way to flush the cache (apparently a WTF in itself, because a 5-minute search yielded nothing)

    Fail. Tools, Clear recent history. Select what you want to clear from the Details and the timeframe and away you go

    The point is that I couldn't find it quickly, not that it isn't easy to get to once you know where it is.

     

    The other place is Preferences, Advanced, Network and there is a clear cache button. I actually had to search for both of these options, as I usually use the Web Developer Toolbar, which has a clear cache action. So much for your "5-minute search" yielding nothing. :) There's also an extension you could install that puts a button in your toolbar to clear the cache.

    @PeriSoft said:

    The coup de grace, (coup de fail?) however, is that SUPER spent an hour transcoding from H.264 to raw frames, and spit out a 1.3mb AVI which does nothing - thus adding another two fails, its functionality and my own trust, to the list. It's a whole fucking day of fail.

    I'll add a small story here: I used ffmpeg to convert a 2 hour FLV into a DVD compatible MPEG (using the "pal-dvd" target), which ended up being 3.8GB (for my brother-in-law: he went over his Internet quota trying to view this video and then wanted to view it on a DVD player). I then tried to use Toast Titanium to burn it as DVD video. It wanted to re-encode it so I just left it overnight. Next morning it then complained that the 5.4GB file is too big to fit on the DVD!  Stupid Toast. I ended up using another CLI program dvdauthor to make the VOBs - much quicker and at least Toast could burn that folder without re-encoding... It turned out pretty good, considering it started life as a VHS rip.

     



  • I find SUPER is a very useful tool to convert all sorts of video formats imaginable, I use it regularly, and it's improving at every newer version. For example now we can join fragmented videos into a single file, I've been looking for such a feature for a long time.

    If you thought erightsoft's download process was a WTF. Things get a bit more suspicious when you monitor its activity in Wireshark while using SUPER. I don't want to unnecessarily alarm anyone, but let's just say I personally prefer using that tool in a sandboxed environment disconnected from the net.



  • Erm, if you're dealing with mpeg video fragments, you can usually just concatenate them together. e.g, cat vid1 vid2 vid3 > vid123 (assuming the fragments aren't too huge, otherwise use dd). In Windows, type vid1 vid2 vid3 > vid123 should work but I've never tried it and Windows tends to mess this sort of thing up.

    In fact, it should work as long as all of the fragments use the same encoding scheme, and it isn't ridiculously old. Modern encoding schemes are based on a packet stream model, and don't really care about file boundaries.



  • Terrible GUIs, hideous amounts of bugs, and spending a long time encoding/loading something only to find the result is completely empty and/or useless are pretty standard when it comes to anything involving video, especially encoding.



  • I used super once and have avoided it like the plague since. IIRC it didn't even do useful things like 2 pass encoding, had crappy ratelimiting (unpredictable filesize), and while it may have used common CLI tools, it used useless settings and produced rubbish encodes.

    Without having to dive into the CLI, I'd say MeGUI is the best for A/V transcoding (and has been a few years). Exposes all the settings for the various codecs (and explains them), includes device profiles, and has a one-click mode if thats what you want. (Maintained by people at Doom9, and as such has close ties to those who develop the CLI encoder tools).



  •  @Tacroy said:

    Erm, if you're dealing with mpeg video fragments, you can usually just concatenate them together. e.g, cat vid1 vid2 vid3 > vid123 (assuming the fragments aren't too huge, otherwise use dd). In Windows, type vid1 vid2 vid3 > vid123 should work but I've never tried it and Windows tends to mess this sort of thing up.

    In fact, it should work as long as all of the fragments use the same encoding scheme, and it isn't ridiculously old. Modern encoding schemes are based on a packet stream model, and don't really care about file boundaries.

    This won't work for anything with a global header, i.e. almost any modern video container format.  It'll work for MPEG-2 TS, and maybe PS depending on the phase of the moon and how much you like desynced audio, and that's about it.  It definitely won't work for AVI, MP4, or MKV, and probably won't work for FLV, OGG, or WMV/ASF.



  • For simple video conversion to a nearly ubiquitous format for viewing, I like Handbrake.  Simple interface, ability to create a que of files to convert, CLI, fast.

    It's faster than Nero (As many bugs, inexplicable crashes, and failures as I've seen with the latest version on Windows 7 I don't know how they can still charge money for the product), Roxio (reliable, but the file sizes are always HUGE. VHS quality video at 4 GB?), or any of the other "free" converters I've run across so far and results in a smaller file size (DVD quality video < 800 MB),  I've tried Super, and while it appears to have enough bells and whistles to choke most elephants, it always (for me) resulted in large, low quality, files that took forever to produce. And I've tried the various WINX products and a few others.



  • @Dark Shikari said:

    It definitely won't work for AVI, MP4, or MKV, and probably won't work for FLV, OGG, or WMV/ASF.
    One of design goals of Ogg was to be able to simply cat files together.



  • @PeriSoft said:

    You miserable, cock-chugging motherfucker!
    *takes notes* I love the internet, it's always helping me expand my vocabulary.

    On a side note what about MediaCoder? Sure it's whiny as hell and the GUI isn't gonna win any design awards, but at least it works and you can find the download link easily



  • @Tacroy said:

    Erm, if you're dealing with mpeg video fragments, you can usually just concatenate them together. e.g, cat vid1 vid2 vid3 > vid123 (assuming the fragments aren't too huge, otherwise use dd). In Windows, type vid1 vid2 vid3 > vid123 should work but I've never tried it and Windows tends to mess this sort of thing up.

    In fact, it should work as long as all of the fragments use the same encoding scheme, and it isn't ridiculously old. Modern encoding schemes are based on a packet stream model, and don't really care about file boundaries.

    copy /b vid1+vid2+vid3 vid123 is the right command.



  •  While I fully support bashing this awful program and it's utterly insane website every year and a half, I should still point out that we've done this one before.



  • @PeriSoft said:

    Then when you actually GET the app, you find a user interface which is only marginally less obtuse...

    If the programmer couldn't get the website right, then how could you really expect the app itself to be much better?



  • @bstorer said:

    we've done this one before.
     

    Hey, it's blakeyrat. I didn't know he was around then.

    Morbius made an excellent joke, then, with the green screen! Lol!



  • @PeriSoft said:

    Now, ladies and gentlemen, try to find a way to download the fucking program! Scroll through dozens and dozens of pages of features and instructions in tiny text! Follow link after link! Find out that it's so goddamned obtuse that the web site author actually had to WRITE A HELP FILE SO PEOPLE COULD FIND OUT HOW TO DOWNLOAD HIS OWN APPLICATION! And then find out that he makes the link DISAPPEAR without any sign or error if your browser disables referrers, has anything (?) in its cache, or doesn't have javascript enabled! What the FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, ERIGHTSOFT!?!?!?!?!!! You miserable, cock-chugging motherfucker! Why do you HATE YOUR USERS!?%%

    While the rant made me laugh my ass off, you might want to cut back on the Mountain Dew before your head explodes.  I'm just sayin'....

     



  • @Smitty said:

    While the rant made me laugh my ass off, you might want to cut back on the Mountain Dew before your head explodes.  I'm just sayin'....

     

     

    I actually hadn't had all that much yesterday evening - and it was all diet, too. Diet mountain dew is awesome - it's like licking nine-volt batteries.



  • @ender said:

    @Dark Shikari said:
    It definitely won't work for AVI, MP4, or MKV, and probably won't work for FLV, OGG, or WMV/ASF.
    One of design goals of Ogg was to be able to simply cat files together.
    Ogg wasn't "designed", it was thrown together in the same fashion that a 4 year old cleans up his room by hiding all the toys in the closet.



  • @Dark Shikari said:

    @ender said:

    @Dark Shikari said:
    It definitely won't work for AVI, MP4, or MKV, and probably won't work for FLV, OGG, or WMV/ASF.
    One of design goals of Ogg was to be able to simply cat files together.
    Ogg wasn't "designed", it was thrown together in the same fashion that a 4 year old cleans up his room by hiding all the toys in the closet.

    But... but...  F/OSS!


  • @Dark Shikari said:

    Ogg wasn't "designed", it was thrown together in the same fashion that a 4 year old cleans up his room by hiding all the toys in the closet.
    I originally wanted to add something in this vein to the end of my post, but decided that somebody else can spread the word about the horror that is Ogg.



  • Oh holy crap! They're selling video conversion software, and they can't even get the picture aspect ratio right on the images in the header of their website. Why would I trust them to do any sort of video conversion correctly?



  • Have you actually looked at the Javascript on that site? That's a WTF in itself. 

    http://www.erightsoft.com/fever00.js
    http://www.erightsoft.com/fever01.js
    http://www.erightsoft.com/fever02.js
    http://www.erightsoft.com/fever03.js



  • @Mole said:

    Have you actually looked at the Javascript on that site? That's a WTF in itself. 

    http://www.erightsoft.com/fever00.js
    http://www.erightsoft.com/fever01.js
    http://www.erightsoft.com/fever02.js
    http://www.erightsoft.com/fever03.js

    Explains everything -- Never code while delerious with fever.



  •  What's wrong with a tool like Handbrake?

     And what's wrong with "Clear History"? Cache, cookies, sessions, it's all part of your browsing history as faras I'm concerned.


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