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.
That’s exactly what this is part of! HISTV is the fruit of one of my many explorations, and that genesis is part of why I posted this in a selfhosting comm.
As to escaping Windows entirely, thanks to Valve’s work on the Proton layer I can feasibly switch to daily driving some flavour of Linux. Soon. I just need to metaphorically get off my ass and trial it out for a few days on a live boot USB to work out any bugbears before making the actual switch (for personal reasons, I’m going to be starting from scratch and setting my environment up right, so it has to go smoothly).
Good luck, although I’d caution you with the general principle of “Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good”. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
It’s not that I need it to be perfect, it’s that I need to make sure I can get my environment running for work on Monday 😅 But thanks, I’m excited that it’s even a feasible option!