It's really all subjective. 1 person will say video sucks and is terrible when another person will see the same video and say it's fine. Just like 1 person will come to my house and say my stereo sounds great but to an audio buff they'll say it sounds like shit. All that matters is if I'm happy with it...
We power some very large programs, some of which encode videos server side and we hear no complaints and they claim our system has greatly increased their revenue. On the flip side, we've had pure startup Webmasters who have never operated a pay site before or made even 1 penny selling memberships piss and moan that the FFMPEG video quality is too poor for them.
Neither person is right and neither is wrong, it's all a matter of opinion and preference. Is the video "horrible"...? No, absolutely not, it's simply horrible by 1 person's standards and basis for comparison.
The number of people who are satisfied outweighs those who aren't 10 to 1. That being the case we still want to find ways to produce the best quality video possible using 100% automated methods.
Our goal as software developers is to work to find a happy medium where both types can be satisfied. That's the ultimate goal.
So far the initial tests we're doing with 2 pass encoding look promising and with new encoding flags we expect big improvements.
