HandBrake

Raised as a usability problem by 16 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2010–2025), in 11 threads.

People raised many different problems with HandBrake, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 16 complaints

Shows all complex options up front, overwhelming first-time users2025-10-31
Simple video conversion is intimidating and requires reading a manual2025-10-31
Preset keeps burning in subtitles, so user must manually undo it for every rip2025-10-30
Too many formats and knobs, with surprising interactions between settings2025-10-21
Not usable by non-technical people for simple tasks like grandmothers or plumbers2025-10-21
The interface is cluttered and confusing to use2024-04-10
Resizing is enabled by default, so encodes get ruined unless the user remembers to turn it off2023-11-19
Syntax for start and end timestamps is confusing when combined2022-11-28
Doesn't copy creation date and camera metadata, forcing manual ffmpeg commands afterward2022-06-01
Changing a setting produced files the player couldn't play, forcing a full re-encode2021-11-17
Settings are hard to understand; poorly documented, took weeks to work out2017-01-26
Ripping all titles and splitting chapters takes too many clicks2016-12-27
Batch-add option for a whole folder is well hidden, took ages to find2014-11-24
GUI is confusing enough that the commenter used the command line instead2014-11-24
Audio sync problems and user cannot tell what they are doing wrong2014-11-23
Interface is horrendous; straying from the DVD ripping path becomes very hard2010-05-03