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.
It’s being built inch by inch. You won’t even know it’s there until you realize you can’t squeeze through it anymore. The trend is extremely obvious: TPM, Secure boot, Windows Store UWP applications, forced updates without consent, or intentional opt-outs that conveniently get ignored or forgotten when it’s convenient for Microsoft to force something. They are intent on taking full control of PCs and locking them down exactly the same way Android phones are locked down, they will follow a few footsteps behind what Android is doing now by preventing third-party apps and app stores, but it’s obviously coming, because they are on exactly the same path for exactly the same reasons.
I don’t imagine we can save everybody either. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying. The more they tighten their grip, the more will slip through their fingers, and all I care about is that the rebellion against Windows grows large enough to survive indefinitely, if not thrive.
Didn’t down vote you but…in general, people follow trends and Windows has been trending for quite a while. Also, people like convenience and I don’t think you will wrest the convenience of Windows out of their hands no matter how much you try to steer them.