My question/curiosity is why do so many people use ffmpeg (frustrated by the syntax) when GStreamer is available?

`gst-launch-1.0 filesrc ! qt4demux ! matroskamux ! filesink...` people would be less frustrated maybe?

People would also learn a little more and be less frustrated when conversation about container/codec/colorspace etc... come up. Each have a dedicated element and you can better understand its I/O

I haven't tried GStreamer but I found FFmpeg to be extremely easy to compile as both a command line tool and library, plus it can do so much out of the box even without external libraries being present. It's already used in pretty much everything and does the job so it never occurred to me (or others) to look for alternatives.

Handbrake ( https://handbrake.fr/ ) and AviDemux ( https://www.avidemux.org/ ) is what the average user needs. Subler ( https://subler.org/ ) is also a good macOS app for muxing and tagging.

I did not know gstreamer wasm also exists, I'll check it out