Original post author here.

It seems like the main criticisms I am getting for this article are because it's escaped past its main target audience, so let me clarify a few things.

This post was born out of me hanging out in communities where people would make their own shortened edits of TV series and, in particular, anime, often to cut out filler or padding. Many people there would make many of the mistakes mentioned in the post, in particular reencoding at every step without knowing how to actually control efficiency/quality. I spent a lot of time helping out individual people one-on-one, but eventually wrote the linked article to collect all of my advice in one place. That way I (or other people I know) can just link to it like "Read the section on containers here," and then answer any follow-up questions, instead of having to explain from scratch each time.

> It seems really weirdly written. / ranty format

So, yes, it does. It was born out of one-to-one explanations on Discord. I wouldn't be surprised if it may seem condescending to a more advanced reader, but if I rant about some point to hammer it down it's because it's a mistake I've seen people make often enough that it has to be reenforced this much. I wouldn't write a professional article this way.

The other point many people seem to get hung up about is the "hate" on VLC. Let me clarify that I do not "hate" VLC at all, I just don't recommend it. VLC is only mentioned once in the entire page, exactly because I didn't want to slot in an intermission purely to list a bunch of VLC issues. I felt like that would qualify more as "hate."

That said, yes, pretty much anyone I know in the fansubbing or encoding community does not recommend VLC because of various assorted issues. The rentry post [1] is often shared to list those, though I don't like how it does not give sources or reproducible examples for the issues it lists. I really do want to go through it and make proper samples and bug reports for all of these issues, I just didn't have the time yet.

Let me also clarify that I have nothing against the VLC developers. VideoLan does great work even outside of VLC, and every interaction I've had with their developers has been great. I just do not recommend the tool.

[1] https://rentry.co/vee-ell-cee