For certain file formats, it's true (e.g. gif), but I gotta say- I use "ffmpeg -i input.mov output.mp4" after taking a video on mac, and it looks good and is a tiny fraction (sometimes 100x smaller) of the size.
Same! And I was pleasantly surprised by this working well without any additional parameters.
But I'd also confirm the other comments after going through the steps for shrinking a longer screen recording to <2.5MB with acceptable quality, and cropping some portion of the screen.
I needed a tutorial in addition to the built-in help pages to get it working.
It was a little bit fun almost to try&error my way through combinations of quality and cropping options, but sure, time consuming.
I have to say, I mostly like FFMPEGs approach. Anyone can build anything on top of it, like GUIs.
"Good" defaults can cause an explosion of complexity when providing many different options and allowing all technically feasible combinations.
There's also room for some kind of improved CLI I guess, but many possibilities always mean complex options. So this is probably easier said than done.
It does seem to have pretty good defaults in the MOV MP4 transcoding case.
