GitHub - obelisk-complex/histv-universal: An overengineered oversimplified system-agnostic frontend for FFMPEG
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An overengineered oversimplified system-agnostic frontend for FFMPEG - obelisk-complex/histv-universal

Honey, I Shrunk The Vids is an overengineered oversimplified system-agnostic frontend for FFMPEG. Built with assistance from Claude, but don’t let that stop you reading - I’ll explain why.

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!

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

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Compiled binaries can be downloaded at https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal/releases

      • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
        66·
        8 months ago

        No one is being a jerk here, stop being defensive.

        What fixes did you apply. That’s what we want to know. It’s not a trick question.

        • Did you use unit tests?
        • Did you check the logic flow so that if I run this code x 10,000 on a ton of media, it isn’t using terribly inefficient settings that will make my 40h workload take two weeks?
        • how are you deploying this thing?

        If you want to present your project, be prepared to explain it. That is completely above board for us to ask.

        • poke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          53·
          8 months ago

          I agree that the comment was rude. Specifically with the “barely tested” asumption/accusation.

          • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
            31·
            8 months ago

            It’s fine, this is healthy discourse we all need to move forward. If we kick out all the vibe coders instead of discussing with them, we will never get them to adhere to any kind of pattern of behaviour.

          • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
            74·
            8 months ago

            Again, get off your high horse.

            They just came out swinging, for no reason.

            You already know how most self-hosted folks feel about vibe coding, or you wouldn’t have taken immediate offence to the initial comment (which ia valid, btw. You did not mark the project as vibe-coded or ai-assisted.) MARK YOUR PROJECT AS AI-ASSISTED.

            Explain where you expect inefficiency and how I can fix it, and I will.

            I’m looking to replace my cron-timed ffmpeg bash and ash scripts for encoding. Three of the four projects I looked at have double- and triple-work loops for work that should be done once. This seems to be a theme in vibe-coded projects.

            And incidentally, the fact that this is a personal project I shared in case someone might find it useful is another reason that coming in here and throwing shade is a shitty thing to do.

            Once again, I’m interested in the project, but I have my own thresholds of quality and security. If you can’t handle questions about your project, personal or not, then maybe don’t share it.

            But why try to make me feel bad about it, because you don’t like the way I built it?

            Sir/Madam, your feeling are your responsibility, not mine. I did not utter any pejoratives your way. Grow up.

              • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
                4·
                8 months ago

                Nice.

                The issues to look for are unnecessary logic (evaluating variables and conditions for no reason), and double sets of variables.

                One of the seasoned devs I work with said she encourages coders to transpose work at major inflection points, and this helps all devs gain an understanding of their own code. The technique is simply to rewrite/refactor the code in a new project manually, changing the names of the variables and arrays. The process forces one to identify where variables and actions are being used and how. It’s not very practical for very big projects, but anything under 1000 lines would benefit from it.

                Good luck.

  • Sockenklaus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    7·
    8 months ago

    This sound awesome and i’d love to try but, your GitHub link delivers a 404.

    Also you hosted the original project on Codeberg but this on GitHub. Is it because of GitHubs ability to build binaries for a wide range of systems or because of Codebergs latest availability issues?

  • ElectricVocalist@jlai.luEnglish
    4·
    8 months ago

    I was doing a lot of manual re-encoding down from insane source bitrates with FFMPEG

    Thank you for your service

  • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
    41·
    8 months ago

    I’m starting to run low on space with my media server, this could be a good way to forestall having to buy hard drives that don’t suck!

    • GreenCrunch@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      12·
      8 months ago

      Transcoding media is great for saving space. My server has but a humble ancient 1TB hard drive (shared with other storage uses). From a DVD (mpeg2), an episode of this one TV show is 1.6-1.8 GB. After transcoding to AV1, it’s 200-400 MB, and I can’t tell the difference in quality. (consider that’s per episode so over an entire series that’s many GB of space saving!)

      I use Veronica Explains’ helpful HandBrake guide, she provides some settings for AV1, which work very well for me (I just saved it as a new preset).

      https://vkc.sh/handbrake-2025/

      And you can do batches of files by opening a directory and adding all. I haven’t tried OP’s tool so I don’t know how it compares to HandBrake, but that works fine for my use case.

      • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        This looks promising! My main use case is Jellyfin through Android TV, and it looks like AV1 has support for that. I currently have about 6 Tb of kids cartoons that are eating up most of my media server, would be great to shrink those slightly.

        I think before I try this, I’ll want to spring for an offline backup of the library, then begin transcoding… I need one anyway, at least now I’m excited enough to actually do it!

          • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
            2·
            8 months ago

            Thanks, I’ll remind myself to report back when I dive in! Ordered the backup drive today, so it’s already in motion. Like you I’m pretty laid back about my video editing work. Simple is good. I do edit a clip show for my kid every week these last two years so I’m at least slightly aware of these ideas, if only as a dilettante.

          • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@feddit.ukEnglish
            1·
            8 months ago

            Hey, HISTV is showing a ton of promise right out the gates. Targeting 5mbps, I’m cutting anime episodes down from 2gb to 1gb with barely any noticeable change in quality. This is some gourmet shit, brethren.

  • SnailMagnitude@mander.xyzEnglish
    2·
    8 months ago

    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.

      • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        I was hoping to catch this before your replied, as I went and read the readme, then it made more sense. So I deleted my reply. But too late!

        I have thousands of video files to transcode, and I didn’t want to have to manually tweak the command for every batch. I also didn’t want to have to rebuild it if I have more to do 6 months down the line - I’m lazy.

        The cool thing is there isn’t much to put into a command that does stuff like this, unless you changing the FFMPEG parameters every time, but that would seem unlikely.

        Yeah for sharing I get some of the bells and whistles.

        What would be cool to have is a much better open source and free TV series renamer if you are looking for a future project!

  • prenatal_confusion@feddit.orgEnglish
    33·
    8 months ago

    Hi, don’t mind the people hating on AI. Doesn’t matter if You use it as a tool to enhance your workflow without just blindly copying code. And it seems Ou so a lot of checking and thinking after the fact.

    But those aspects don’t matter to people that have a fixed mindset and are convinced they are right and everyone doing it differently is wrong ( I think there is a name for that kind of condition…). You are vibe coding therefore you are stupid and need to either see the light or be buried. They are not rude, they are just trying to make you see the light! It’s always the same conversation. First downvotes, dismissive or outright rude comments and then you engage and try to have a civil conversation about something specific and then the goalposts start to move.

    I get why some people have a radical position on AI but they need to learn that there are other positions too.

    Yes AI is resource hungry but at the same time they are not vegetarians or vegans and drive a car and fly for holidays. Calculate them apples (emissions).

    You made something you are proud of, you made it for yourself and you wanted to show and tell. Good on you! They are just bullies.

  • Phoenixz@lemmy.caEnglish
    56·
    8 months ago

    built with AI

    Bye!

    No no no, keep reading, it’s awesome!

    It’s not, it’s slop

    Byes