WilliamBarrows
Member
TL;DR: Please change or remove the new "Custom Muxer Settings" textbox in Simple mode. It's too narrow to belong in Simple mode, all it does is confuse novice users.
There's a few reasons why the "Custom Muxer Settings" field isn't as useful as it could be, maybe even detrimental to ease of use:
1. It's too narrow for simple mode. I honestly can't think of a situation where you'd need to pass things to the muxer, but wouldn't also need another feature only supported by advanced mode. (In general I don't think needing to pass parameters to the muxer is very common)
2. Simple mode is geared towards novice users, meaning users that aren't too familiar with how streaming/encoding works. Many of them likely won't know the difference between an Encoder and a Muxer, thus think the field has the same function as the "Custom Encoder Settings" one. (The fact that they look so similar doesn't help either) This will lead to them wrongly entering stuff like crf in the field, then getting confused when it doesn't work.
3. I don't see a reason why the field couldn't just be another "Custom Encoder Settings" field. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure one could feed muxer parameters through an encoder field just fine, and have that field also accept more commonly needed parameters like crf. This would make things alot more intuitive, and provide a bigger coverage for what simple mode can do, so people won't be forced to use advanced mode for custom x264 parameters.
In other words, I think it would improve OBS if the field was either removed, changed to a "Custom Encoder Settings" field, or equipped with some sort of help text/message to keep novice users from confusing it with a second "Custom Encoder Settings" field.
There's a few reasons why the "Custom Muxer Settings" field isn't as useful as it could be, maybe even detrimental to ease of use:
1. It's too narrow for simple mode. I honestly can't think of a situation where you'd need to pass things to the muxer, but wouldn't also need another feature only supported by advanced mode. (In general I don't think needing to pass parameters to the muxer is very common)
2. Simple mode is geared towards novice users, meaning users that aren't too familiar with how streaming/encoding works. Many of them likely won't know the difference between an Encoder and a Muxer, thus think the field has the same function as the "Custom Encoder Settings" one. (The fact that they look so similar doesn't help either) This will lead to them wrongly entering stuff like crf in the field, then getting confused when it doesn't work.
3. I don't see a reason why the field couldn't just be another "Custom Encoder Settings" field. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure one could feed muxer parameters through an encoder field just fine, and have that field also accept more commonly needed parameters like crf. This would make things alot more intuitive, and provide a bigger coverage for what simple mode can do, so people won't be forced to use advanced mode for custom x264 parameters.
In other words, I think it would improve OBS if the field was either removed, changed to a "Custom Encoder Settings" field, or equipped with some sort of help text/message to keep novice users from confusing it with a second "Custom Encoder Settings" field.