UPDATE THREAD (it’s prettier, and on Mac and Linux now): https://piefed.ca/c/selfhosted/p/571213/honey-i-shrunk-the-vids-mr-universe-edition-v1-0-5
histv - Honey, I Shrunk The Vids
An overengineered PowerShell frontend for FFMPEG
Predendum 6/MAR/26: Yes, I’m using genAI - specifically Claude - to help me build and improve this application. But, I believe I’m using genAI differently than the majority of projects. For one thing, I’m not blindly copy-pasting output and crossing my fingers that it works. I read the output, looking for things I know are wrong, and try to fix it; if I can’t, I ask what I’m doing wrong, and then I fix it. When I encounter errors, I’m reading the error output and if I know how to fix it I do it myself. I’m trying to actually learn, but I do that best by diving in and fixing the mistakes I make. I test informally* on the hardware I have available, which is two Windows PCs, and sometimes my friend with a 2016 Mac will do a test run for me to confirm stuff works. (*by “informally”, I mean I don’t write test cases. I know how, but they’re repetitive and I hate them and I’m not doing it for my personal projects or I’ll end up hating my hobbies.)
My goal in posting my projects is not to have other people audit my code for me, nor do I want kudos or approbation (except for any jokes you see. Those are all me). I’m posting what I’ve got when I’ve got it largely working, in case other people find it useful, and that’s it. I do hope that if people see something I could refactor or conventions I should be adhering to, they’ll drop me a (civil) note about it so I can keep it mind. I appreciate feedback and advice, but I’m not expecting it.
Thanks for reading, I hope you find HISTV useful!
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.
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.
I have actively and deliberately chosen not to be the kind of person who just “gives up” anymore so I’m not really sure what it is you’re trying to convince me of, but I don’t think it’s going to change the direction of my efforts. The steering must continue, and even if the ship goes down anyway, it will go down with me still at the helm.
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. Succinctly:
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.