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.
Literally the only thing missing is the fact that developers still go out of their way to support windows. If windows’ proliferation taught you anything, it should be that the people will follow the tools, wherever they happen to be.
Of course devs cater to Windows. 1 Billion + user base that are consumers. Why not target the biggest market share? I still use Linux, Mac, and Windows, although the latter is a ‘crippled’ version…very heavily modified. Until I can find a Linux version of BlueBeam that matches it feature for feature, then I’ll stick with using Windows, But I’ve never viewed it as a competition. It may seem shocking but I have no real preference other than what it takes to get the job done without handing over all your data. Linux makes that easier, but Windows can be tailored to do pretty much the same. It just takes a lot more work.