Handbrake is frustrated with bad end-users 29 Mar 2007 

This post was originally entitled “Handbrake doesn’t care about black people… I mean end-users.” After reading through some of the comments made by the Handbrake developers at the bottom of this page, it seems that they do care about end-users… they’re just frustrated by bad end-users. Thanks for the dialog and clarification, Handbrake team!

First off, I need to clarify that the title of this post is a joke in reference to idiot rapper Kanye West’s claim that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Now that we have that settled, I came across a posting on Handbrake’s support forums that irritated me to no end, and I felt I need to share. If you’ve never heard of Handbrake, the team describes their project as “…an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 ripper/converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.” It’s a cool piece of software for exercising your fair use rights that the DMCA has attempted to take away from us.

If you haven’t read the above linked post, please read it before moving on. I’ll wait.

My first response when I read this was “No, no, no, no, no!” Now, the posting begins with a few bullet points that I generally agree with. Yes, software innovation is good. Yes, code inspection by other peers is good. No, it’s not cool when people come and begin demanding features immediately. No, it’s not cool to hassle or insult the developers. But from there, the author completely misses the point of writing software for other people to use.

Now, maybe the author has reached that point because the Handbrake community has had a number of “bad egg” users who hassle the developers like they owe them something. I feel very fortunate to be part of the SimplePie community which rarely ever has bad eggs or raving lunatics demanding features be built right this second. But even then, who are they building the software for?

Communities are very important to software projects. Bug reports, patches, feature requests, and all sorts of other things are important parts of the growth of a product. No, we don’t always have time to answer support forums in the timeliest of manners, and no we can’t implement every single feature that gets asked for. But we certainly listen, and we certainly try to work in the more relevant and useful features, and we’re always looking for ways to make things simpler for people either by a change in SimplePie or a tutorial and/or code sample of some sort. Why? Because this project would never have become as good as it has without our users and their feedback.

Handbrake’s team seems to think that they are just fine without end-user support. They seem to believe that they already know what is best for Handbrake, and that there’s no suggestion their users can make that they haven’t already thought of. GIVE. ME. A. BREAK. SimplePie started out as one guy scratching an itch and opening up the source for code review and suggestions. It was built around a series of functions, only supported one feed per page, and had maybe 5 users. Nowadays, SimplePie is being used by thousands and thousands of people all over the world, it’s fully object-oriented, supports all sorts of specifications, supports several feeds per page, and a whole variety of other cool features. Why? Because we already know what’s best and don’t want your input? No, no, no. SimplePie is successful because we listen to our users. I never envisioned SimplePie would be able to do the things it can now. We know that we’ve got good people in our community who have all sorts of ideas about how SimplePie could be better — and it shows!

So, best of luck to Handbrake. They seem like they know how successful they want their project to be. As for myself, I’ve deleted my copy of Handbrake and will look elsewhere for my video transcoding needs.

Posted by Ryan Parman at 5:21 pm.

Comment by Bruce 31 Mar 2007 at 12:33 pm 

As a user let me say that the healthy attitude of the SimplePie developers shows. It seems like the Handbrake developers have shot themselves in the foot. As for alternatives I’ve personally found MPEG Streamclip to be a valuable tool.

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Comment by Chip 31 Mar 2007 at 4:36 pm 

Spend some time on the forum…I feel bad for these guys. They pour they hearts and souls into a project and get nothing but flac from the community (overstatement, but some of the posts are ridiculous).

I think this is a statement of the need for a program like HB and its popularity (and noobyness).

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Comment by Scott 31 Mar 2007 at 5:00 pm 

Your perfectly entitled to your opinion but i’d like to clear a few things up.

We are open to feedback on anything and we encourage it (within reason).
There is only a small group of us actively writing code. Then theres a few others that come in, write a feature they’d like then leave or maybe linger around. This is great but that leaves only a small group of us that actually spent any sorta time on the project.

Therein lies the problem. Too few resources and developers. Unless a developer see’s a request that sparks an interest, its probably not going to get implemented. After all it is that developers free time hes spending on improving the project. This is something i see in alot of open source developers.

Rhesters document may appear to come off a bit harsh but it does make some valid points. How these are portrayed here may not have been the best way.

We do have a few users that cause a problem, but we also have alot of good users who actually take 5mins out to do a bit of research first before coming to us with request or bug reports. You will notice on the forum we do thank them for this and encourage others to do the same.

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Comment by Jonathon Rubin 31 Mar 2007 at 5:03 pm 

Ryan, as a HandBrake developer, I find what you’ve written to be rather misleading. We do not refuse user requests. In fact, we’ve so far implemented several user requests since taking charge of the project: a deinterlacing preference, monophonic and surround audio encoding, chapter markers, presets, copy and paste functionality, and title numbers in default output names. And that’s just in the Mac and Linux versions — sr55 has added a number of user requests to the Windows GUI as well. Furthermore, I’ve added quite a few of user requests to the Trac, as enhancements to be added in the future: .vob and .ts encoding, frame-by-frame preview step-through, Matroska support, soft subtitles, DTS pass-through, PSP support, encoding from arbitrary timestamps, audio normalization, preserving subtitle coloration, n-pass support, and hinting .mp4 files for streaming.

I also feel you misconstrue Rodney’s words when you say “Handbrake’s team seems to think that they are just fine without end-user support.” He says no such thing. If that were true, why would I have been spending my time this past month writing official user documentation (http://handbrake.m0k.org/trac/wiki/HandBrakeGuide) ? Why would all the active developers read and respond to user comments on the forum? Why would we sit in the IRC channels 24/7, ready to answer user questions?

You suggest “Now, maybe the author has reached that point because the Handbrake community has had a number of ‘bad egg’ users who hassle the developers like they owe them something.” This is exactly what occurred. You then ask “But even then, who are they building the software for?” The answer is: for ourselves, and for the vast majority of our users — who aren’t bad eggs who hassle the developers like we owe them something.

PS: I haven’t run this comment by any other members of the HandBrake team, so please don’t view this as an official statement from the project.

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Comment by clee 31 Mar 2007 at 5:28 pm 

So, I’m speaking as a HandBrake developer here. The thing is, it’s not that we think we know every single thing that we could possibly want HandBrake to do ever; it’s just that we’re trying very hard to avoid HandBrake becoming some sort of monster tool that does everything from DVD ripping to WEP cracking.

The biggest problem with our community has been that there are certain users who come up with ideas, they submit the requests, and these ideas are absolutely ridiculous. Things like “Hey, why not port HandBrake to use a completely different Windows-only transcoding engine, and lose your cross-platform compatibility?”

We *do* welcome feature ideas from our users. But when the users submit ideas that make absolutely no sense to implement, and then they refuse to take “no” for an answer, it gets very frustrating.

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Comment by Robert Swain 31 Mar 2007 at 7:01 pm 

I’ve had little contact with HandBrake until very recently but maybe my perspective will be of interest to people.

An on-line friend of my pointed me to HandBrake and MediaFork recently. I happened to check the website one day and saw that the projects had merged. I noted they had an IRC channel and decided to pop in and say hello.

That was last week and since then I’ve had multiple extended technical and non-technical discussions with the developers residing in the development channel on IRC and they’ve been nothing but pleasant, reasonable and motivated to adding new features and solving current issues.

They’re definitely a bunch of people I think I can work with quite easily and I actually hope that I don’t come across as a big smelly meany through some of the things I say or the way I say them.

I don’t know too much about the HandBrake forums but I suspect, from the comments in the linked forum thread, that feature requests are very frequent, demanding and repetitive to the point that it’s become annoying to some members.

People who want to spend time working on the software in question don’t want to spend time repeating the same responses over and over again to people who decide they don’t want to put in a little extra effort and look through whatever documentation is available. This is the point that was being made and is the case in many many open source projects. The point is not that the community should be ignored because their input is not desirable, not useful and has already been considered.

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Comment by Ryan Parman 31 Mar 2007 at 7:18 pm 

Scott, Jonathon, clee, and Robert: Engaging in this conversation is helpful in clearing the air a bit with those of us who use your software. The points you all make are completely valid, and are things that all development teams struggle with. Sometimes users forget that they’re dealing with other human beings, and that they’re frequently getting this software for free. Again, all valid points.

But that’s not the tone of the forum post linked to from the Handbrake homepage. The tone of the post was condescending at best, and absolutely written at the height of frustration. If you need to come down on people for poor behavior, do it after you’ve cooled off… otherwise you end up writing things like this that end up coming back to haunt you (by people like me and a few other bloggers who use your software).

I would make the following suggestions:

1. When everybody is calm, put together a list of expectations you have for the behavior of the people who come to the forums.
2. Make sure that people understand that this project is built by a few developers in their spare time.
3. Make a list of guidelines that you tend to follow (like trying to keep the project cross-platform, for example) that you can point back to when people start asking for platform-specific stuff.
4. Do it in a way that is customer and service oriented. If you need to say no to a feature, provide a reasonable explanation that a typical end-user can understand.

I’m not saying that you guys don’t do these things, I just want to encourage you to not make the same mistake as those ‘bad’ users, and remember that you are also dealing with people.

I understand the point of the posting, but I think the delivery was terrible. I would recommend that you work on that, and then do whatever you can to properly set expectations for your users.

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Comment by Rodney Hester 2 Apr 2007 at 6:28 am 

Now that everyone else has gone ahead and responded, I’ll put my two cents in, but only insofar as things that haven’t been covered already.

Yes, the forum post in question was written in frustration - but while the tone itself may have been a little rough, the facts as presented there are indeed true, despite what others would wish to be the case. From small to large, I’ve yet to see a single example of an open-source project where a core group of volunteer programmers sit around polling end-users for what they want and harriedly implement the requests…though I’d certainly love to see an example to the contrary, at which point I would invite the poor souls out for a beer and introduce them to the Real World(TM). =) (As a slight aside, this is why I made the comparison to commercial software - which is, by definition, focused on end-user needs but only because of the driving force of a market economy. No such force exists in open source, thankfully.)

On a more serious note, I expect the ‘few other bloggers’ who took issue with me actually refers to this http://www.infinitenexus.com/blog/?p=61, which has received a total of one valid reply to date which was counter to the author’s stated opinion. I wrote - but did not post - a very detailed reply (that was many pages long!) that was signed off on by the core development team but never actually submitted for fear of touching off a flame war - the author in question did not seem interested in being corrected as much as spouting his opinion as fact, but then, that’s my opinion. I still have the text of our collective reply if anyone wants to see it, though it essentially covers off (in a bit more detail, perhaps) on what was written above.

The reality is, by and large, our project has a very large (30,000+), extremely active userbase. A very small percentage of these people fall into one of two groups: The excessively demanding and the intentionally ignorant. These ‘bad eggs’, as it were, are part of an extremely vocal minority than unfortunately colors the atmosphere of the forums somewhat…because those who use HandBrake daily and are pleased with what it delivers generally have nothing to say, at least in public.

We have, however, received a large number of very positive and encouraging responses from our community since - and as a result of - that forum post that make it clear the bad eggs do *not* represent the vast majority of the HandBrake community, for which we are most grateful. =) I am concerned that people are picking out one single posting (perhaps it should not be sticky and deciding that sums up the HandBrake community and development team. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For applications out there with a relatively small, self-contained, more-than-average technically inclined userbase capable of thoughtful, measured requests and feedback, enjoy it. We sadly lack that advantage, having an application that appeals to a very wide swath of users at all levels of technical knowledge and reading comprehension (and plain old laziness). We must take the bad with the good. The bad tend to be loud and obnoxious. =)

Referring to ‘ignorance’ above, that’s exactly what it is. Perhaps our project is somewhat unique in this regard, but the average HandBrake user (to the best of our knowledge - perhaps we don’t know because they are silent doesn’t take the time to actually research Google, the FAQ and the forums to see if their question has already been posed and answered, don’t bother to read the stickies regarding known bugs and already-requested and either implemented or rejected features, etc. - they all follow a common pattern: a) register for the forum, b) ask their question or make their demand, c) wait for someone to spoon-feed them the answer and/or jump to implement their completely outrageous request. In HandBrake’s past, these people would simply have been silently ignored…but that was also the leading complaint of how HandBrake was supported in the past. Now, ironically, people with actual knowledge and accountability are responding, but being judged for it. Perhaps a return to silence is in order…

I am certainly more than open to any suggestions anyone can make on how to force people to read and think for themselves. I would love to know how to make people be Good Netizens(TM). Usenet tried and failed, and I doubt we will be much more successful. The real issue isn’t one of unintentional ignorance - the people we are referring to - and to whom I took issue with in my forum posting - are those who _choose_ ignorance out of sheer laziness and lack of motivation to find out anything for themselves. They are, in fact, a primary reason why developers don’t generally interact directly with end-users on large-scale projects and why so many projects continue to favor restricted mailing lists over open forums.

I would like to point out that we are leading the HandBrake project in a rather unprecedented way - we are *truly* open. Everything about our project - the source code, the forums, even our IRC channels are recorded and immediately made available to the general public for their perusal…this means that not only do you see the typical public/sanitized communications from the developers, but you can also see them at their most stressed, warts and all. It exposes us merely for what we are - human.

If people would prefer a more ‘polished’ look to the HandBrake project, where all communications are “official” in nature only, the forums are removed, and the IRC channels are made private so people don’t feel inclined to make blog posts such as yours , we can do that. We’d *prefer* to do that. It would certainly make our lives easier. But we prefer to hold to our ideals of complete openness and transparency, even though it makes our imperfections and occasional frustrations public knowledge. Open means something to us.

I would like to make clear that the development team did _not_ review this post, they are unaware it is being made, and I speak only for myself herein with rare exception.

I do appreciate you taking the time to re-review the situation and take the more global situation into account and update your post accordingly - it certainly suggests that you are interested in getting accurate information out rather than simply bashing, which is welcomed and as it should be.

For the curious - since I seem to be the lightning rod for much of the (very limited) negative press about HandBrake, you will be relieved to know that I will officially be stepping down as project lead effective one week from today, owing to other more pressing life obligations (as part of a growing family). This was planned more than a month ago, and I have been working hard behind the scenes ever since to ensure the smoothest possible transition.

I have immensely enjoyed my time with the project, and never would have guessed that it would grow so large or strong so quickly after having been pulled from the charred embers of last year. I certainly never intended all of this, but I do welcome it, and I am confident that HandBrake will remain strong, well-supported, and continue to innovate in the years to come. I am very proud of HandBrake and the development community that sprung up around it - my hat is off to you all and my best wishes for the future!

Sincerely,

Rodney Hester

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Comment by Ryan Parman 2 Apr 2007 at 8:57 am 

Rodney, I must say that it’s good to hear that sensible people are working on Handbrake. As a more casual user, I would use Handbrake from time to time, and occasionally visit the site.

Once day I come across the site, and see a posting that *sounds* very consumer-negative. Points of frustration were noted (every project has some ‘bad egg’ users), but from there it seemed as though the rest of the posting took those valid points and drew a very negative conclusion. It seemed very unfortunate, and as someone who tends to be very user-centric (I’m becoming a Certified Usability Analyst), the posting sounded like nails on a chalkboard.

I’m truly happy that you guys have an attitude toward consumers that is not the same as the forum posting. Again, as a more casual user — and for other casual users like me — that posting could end up losing you users that are otherwise very happy with your product.

My mind has been changed on this issue, gentlemen. Thank you for taking the time to clarify.

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