histv - Honey, I Shrunk The Vids
An overengineered PowerShell frontend for FFMPEG
screenshots




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.



Thanks! Yeah, I can’t run the transcode on my server for various reasons so I have to do it on my local machine. Dunno if tdarr supports that. Probably should have found out before rolling my own, but I wanted to see if I could do it 😅
Tdarr can distribute compute to other nodes, so you could set it up on your server and have your workstation do the actual transcoding.
TIL, cheers! That’s pretty awesome. Now that this is working, I’ll probably drop it entirely and move on to learning Tdarr, I’m really curious how the network compute works 😅