Honey, I Shrunk The Vids is an overengineered oversimplified system-agnostic frontend for FFMPEG.
This is a followup to a post I made yesterday, about a silly little Windows application I’d made for batch transcoding files. I wanted something that I could just dump my files onto without having to muck about with Handbrake or Tdarr - post here, for those curious: https://piefed.ca/c/selfhosted/p/568748/honey-i-shrunk-the-vids-a-windows-transcoding-frontend-for-ffmpeg
So I spent today making my silly little Windows application a silly little platform-agnostic application. I rewrote the whole thing in Rust and JavaScript with a webview frontend, and apparently Github lets you compile binaries for quite the range of target platforms, so I have compiled binaries available for Windows, Linux, and Mac (Intel/Apple Silicon). It’s got a dark theme because of course and a light theme because I guess, also it’s themeable because why the hell not. I’m pretty pleased with how it’s coming along - if anyone decides to give it a go, please let me know if you find issues!
screenshots
Compiled binaries can be downloaded at https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal/releases
Cool, I just tend to run one liners or little shell scripts but nice to see more of this stuff appearing.
Worth considering the backend too imo, as I imagine I’m not the only one here trying to leverage the most out of potatoes with not a lot of storage.
On my little n100 boxen for example having a building ffmpeg for the cpu/igpu to use hardware decoding gives ~5x the encode speed for a slightly larger filesize for hevc.
Well, good news - I got some pointers on places that genAI usually makes mistakes, so I’ve gone through a round of performance fixes for things like unnecessary worker duplications which - next to the actual encoding - I didn’t notice the impact of on my desktop.
As to using hardware encoding, HISTV runs a test render for hevc and h264 across amf, nvenc, and qsv - so pretty much, if your hardware supports it, HISTV will detect it and let you choose which encoder you want to use. You can even use libx264/libx265 by choice if you want to take advantage of the more efficient compression; doing so exposes a toggle for CRF if you’d rather use that than QP.