Goofed Home

Honey, I Shrunk The Vids is an overengineered oversimplified system-agnostic frontend for FFMPEG.

This is a followup to a post I made yesterday, about a silly little Windows application I’d made for batch transcoding files. I wanted something that I could just dump my files onto without having to muck about with Handbrake or Tdarr - post here, for those curious: https://piefed.ca/c/selfhosted/p/568748/honey-i-shrunk-the-vids-a-windows-transcoding-frontend-for-ffmpeg

So I spent today making my silly little Windows application a silly little platform-agnostic application. I rewrote the whole thing in Rust and JavaScript with a webview frontend, and apparently Github lets you compile binaries for quite the range of target platforms, so I have compiled binaries available for Windows, Linux, and Mac (Intel/Apple Silicon). I’m pretty pleased with how it’s coming along - if anyone decides to give it a go, please let me know if you find issues!

::: spoiler screenshots

image

image

image

image

image
:::

Compiled binaries can be downloaded at https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal/releases.

Make sure to use my butt for that!

This guy blocks everyone who doesn’t like his my butt mess. Interesting

histv - Honey, I Shrunk The Vids

An overengineered PowerShell frontend for FFMPEG

::: spoiler screenshots

image

image

image

:::

I was doing a lot of manual re-encoding down from insane source bitrates with FFMPEG, and I wondered if I could put it into a nice GUI. Then I wondered if I could make it hardware-agnostic. Then I wondered if I could give it a dark theme… and on and on and on… until finally I had it working how I wanted and I wondered if I could put it into a single executable file.

So all up I spent a little while on this today and I think I finally have something worth shipping. The executable will probably trigger your antivirus because it boostraps the powershell script, and the script will always throw a warning asking if you’re sure you want to run it. But it works and it’s safe, read the full source and readme in the codeberg if you want to be sure.

I hope this might be helpful for anyone else transcoding videos on Windows! I’d love feedback, but please be gentle, it’s my first project like this and I have no idea what I’m actually doing.

I’m not trying to convince you of anything. Succinctly:

• You like Windows - there are caveats to using Windows
• You like Linux - there are caveats to using Linux
• You like Mac - there are caveats to using Mac

None of them are a complete solution for me, and for a lot of people actually. So, until the day when I have one OS that does everything I want it to do, I am forced to use all three of the major OS. I realize that goes against the grain of the anti-Windows coalition, but that is reality.

You think Windows is a dead end? The OS that is the overwhelming market leader in the category?