- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/41813614
I’m currently working on a file converter app that lets you easily convert your files in bulk without needing to mess around with 500 settings or confusing command-line apps. It’s mostly a replacement for all those “convert X to Y” websites.
This is just a front-end for ffmpeg and imagemagick, but the goal is to make something so simple even my parents could use without uploading sensitive files to shady websites on the internet. I’ve looked around, and I found all the local GUI converters like Handbrake are unwieldy to use, especially if you just want to convert in bulk.
The project is still very early, but I’d like some feedback:
Does anyone think this project is worth finishing, or are there too many GUI file converters out there already?
What do you think about the UI so far?
Cheers.
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A native UI would be nice, but this also works.
Good idea for an app. Linux especially would benefit from more high quality apps aimed at less-technical users.
Would be good to include audio-only conversion too.
Can it convert flac to wavpack?
You’ve taken an approach here where you intentionally hide the fact that a video file is (at least) 3 different technical formats that are independently variable. An “MP4” file can have a range of audio codecs, a range of video codecs, timed-text formats, additional audio, and so on. And there is no single standard composition that works everywhere.
When you simplify a matrix of user choices by making the vcodec, acodec, and timed text format choices on behalf of your users, you take on the burden of making sure those work everywhere the users want to playback. What you’ll find is that most devices on the market only support a very limited range of container+vcodec+acodec combinations, they are undocumented more often than not, and buggy as hell.
The oversimplification approach you’re taking is “ingesting anything, but output only ‘Value Meal #1’ for everybody.” This has value for some people, but it puts a big burden on you to make choices that playback mostly correctly on a wide variety of devices, and it mysteriously breaks things that don’t work everywhere (like surround sound, ambisonics, many timed text formats etc.). There’s a reason why all that choice exists, even if most people don’t, don’t want to, and shouldn’t need to understand it.
Not trying to dissuage you. Just sharing experience. :-)
This would be great for Emulation, for example converting .bin + .cue OR .iso to .pbp, .rvz etc.
Well for ffmpeg the best converor I know is shutter encoder written in java
Any reason not to use https://github.com/VERT-sh/VERT?
VERT is really close but not totally what I was looking for, it’s a web app rather than a local program and AFAIK can’t convert videos locally, you’d have to upload it to a server and download them again.
VERT is a file conversion utility that uses WebAssembly to convert files on your device instead of a cloud.
Doesn’t sound like you’re uploading to the server.
Video files are an exception since it would be too slow on WASM
Q: What happens with video files?
Video files get uploaded to our lightning-fast RTX 4000 Ada server. Your videos stay on there for an hour if you do not convert them. If you do convert the file, the video will stay on the server for an hour, or until it is downloaded. The file will then be deleted from our server.
Given that the server end is self-hostable one could just bundle the frontend and the backend into a single package and run that as an app. I imagine that might be a bit too much though.
This looks great so far! I love the concept of an app that makes conversions easy for the most typical use cases.
It looks like you’re still early in the UI phase, so you probably have plans for this already, but I feel like the progress screen could use more feedback than only two progress bars.
Overall though, this looks like it could be solid! Good luck!
Convert a CSV into a wmv.
I wish I had something to convert vector image formats to dxf. That’s probably beyond the scope of this.
https://www.google.com/search?q=svg+to+dxf+command+line yields
inkscape --export-type="dxf" input.svg --export-filename=output.dxfAt which point it is just bash scripting, for loops, and printf/awk. Which… is a Thing but it is also a Thing you only have to solve once (and actually is great fodder for LLMs).
Out of topic, but how viable is godot for creating desktop/mobile apps? Can it be used for “serious” stuff, or is it more of an improvisation?
I have a whole blog post talking about using Godot for GUI development. The short of it is that it’s surprisingly good but has a few drawbacks, and it doesn’t have a bustling ecosystem like webdev tools. I’ve yet to try it on mobile, though.
Nice post! Thanks for sharing
https://materialmaker.org/ got made in it. I don’t know any other apps made in it but if it’s anyway similar to unity it’s doable
Making apps with Godot is actually very doable, it takes care of a lot of the typical annoyances involved with that process like UI layout, theme support, and cross platform distribution. The Godot language (GDScript) is very approachable and powerful, too.
The Godot editor itself is made with Godot, and here’s a few other nice examples of apps that I know of:
GodSVG
Wonderdraft (paid app)
Pixelorama
I love this idea.
