There's nearly 2 million lines of code in the FFMPEG codebase: unless you're building the next Adobe Premiere, no matter how much value you provide, you are building an extremely shallow wrapper around FFMPEG when you build an interface to crop videos.
No one is saying a shallow wrapper can't provide value, but most of the value for the end user is derived from FFMPEG, not the layer you added to it.
If we took FFMPEG and your wrapper and separated them, FFMPEG could still do the one task that your users need: it would be harder, and it would be less convenient, but it can still crop videos. Your tool would no longer do anything but draw rectangles where we'd like a crop to appear. It'd meet no user needs at all.
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Also to clarify my stance, there's nothing wrong with shallow wrappers, and I've made shallow wrappers: I know finding the user need, and thinking of the right UX and figuring out distribution is all a lot of real legwork.
But I also find it's important to realize when most of the value you're providing is enabled by something you built on. There shouldn't be shame in admitting that you wrapped something that was powerful and potentially unwieldy for your segment of users and made it useful.
There's nearly 2 million lines of code in the FFMPEG codebase: unless you're building the next Adobe Premiere, no matter how much value you provide, you are building an extremely shallow wrapper around FFMPEG when you build an interface to crop videos.
No one is saying a shallow wrapper can't provide value, but most of the value for the end user is derived from FFMPEG, not the layer you added to it.
If we took FFMPEG and your wrapper and separated them, FFMPEG could still do the one task that your users need: it would be harder, and it would be less convenient, but it can still crop videos. Your tool would no longer do anything but draw rectangles where we'd like a crop to appear. It'd meet no user needs at all.
-
Also to clarify my stance, there's nothing wrong with shallow wrappers, and I've made shallow wrappers: I know finding the user need, and thinking of the right UX and figuring out distribution is all a lot of real legwork.
But I also find it's important to realize when most of the value you're providing is enabled by something you built on. There shouldn't be shame in admitting that you wrapped something that was powerful and potentially unwieldy for your segment of users and made it useful.