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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

There's a low-hanging fruit that I think would make ffmpeg more helpful for regular people.

There's a million terrible websites that offer file conversion services. They're ad-ridden, with god-knows-what privacy/security postures. There's little reason for users to need to upload their files to a third-party when they can do it locally. But getting them to download fiddly technical software is tough - and they're right to mistrust it.

So, there's a WASM version of ffmpeg, already working and hosted at Netlify [1]. It downloads the WASM bundle to your browser and you can run conversions/transformations as you wish, in your browser. Sandboxed and pretty performant too!

If this tool a) was updated regularly b) had a nicer, non-CLI UI for everyday users and c) was available at an easily-Googlable domain name - it would solve all the problems I mentioned above.

[1]: https://ffmpegwasm.netlify.app/

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Or you could download HandBrake?

Browsers are annoying. They constrict the designer, they constrict the user, they're overly complicated, slow, bloated... I don't know why people keep pushing them to do things they are bad at.

I wish 20 years ago we'd made a concerted effort to make Java suck less. We'd have the universal applications everyone wants but nobody wants to put effort into. But the web was new-ish, and people didn't realize that hypertext document viewers would become an entire application platform and mini OS.

What I'd really like to see is something like FlatPak, but for all platforms. Basically it would be containerized GUI apps, but one repository for one app that serves all platforms. On Android, MacOS, Windows, etc, you would run your "flatpak add https://some/repository/ my-app && flatpak pull my-app && flakpak run my-app" (but in a GUI, like an App Store you control). And that would pull the image for your platform and run it. Since it's containerized, you get all the dependencies, it's multi-arch, & you control how it executes in a sandbox. You could use the same programming language per platform, or different languages; same widgets, different widgets; it wouldn't matter because each platform just downloads and runs an image for that platform. This wouldn't stop us from having/making "a better Java", but it would make it easier to support all platforms, distribute applications securely, update them, run them in a sandbox, etc. Imagine being able to ship a single app to Windows and iOS users that's just a shell script and 'xdialog'. Or if you prefer, a single Go app. Or a sprawling Python or Node.js app. Whatever you want. The user gets a single way to install and run an app on any platform, and developers can support multiple platforms any way they want. No more "how do I develop for iOS vs Windows"; just write your app and push your container.

If Java had won, we'd be complaining about Java instead of web technologies. It doesn't ultimately matter, when you have a platform as large as the web is, it's going to be complicated and bloated.

This proposal is to offer competition to web-based conversion websites. If users are willing and able to find Handbrake and download it, it can work for them. But everyday users are right to distrust software downloaded from the Internet.

Many users are in environments where its not possible to download new software (schools, work places, universities).

The browser has its disadvantages, but it is the most widely-deployed sandboxed execution environment providing incredibly easy distribution of software.

I'm quite sure that the reason conversion websites are popular is Google. I don't know if they're just very good at SEO or search engines have a specific policy to favor web-based solution.

If you search for "mov to mp4", Handbrake is NOWHERE to see. The 10th result for me is a Cloudflare article explaining what's the difference between mov and mp4. The ~20th result is a book called Business Funding For Dummies (no shit). Handbrake is after these. The legend says I'm still scrolling trying to find where it is.

How is an average user supposed to know Handbrake or this FFmpeg WASM site?

> But everyday users are right to distrust software downloaded from the Internet.

They're right to distrust apps that run in their browsers too, but that hasn't stopped anybody. These days everyone is scared to death of an .exe but will happily execute whatever random code a stranger on the internet comes up with if they only have to click on a link to run it on their devices. Warnings that WASM is a malware author's dream weren't enough (https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/ecriminals-increasingly-use...) and browser sandbox escapes happen all the time but nobody seems to care. I can't even just pick on WASM, JS isn't much better and even CSS/HTML alone is getting complex enough that it can be used maliciously.

> browser sandbox escapes happen all the time

Far far rarer than downloading a virus.

> WASM is a malware author's dream weren't enough (https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/ecriminals-increasingly-use...)

Because it can run a crypto miner, really?

Using it for obfuscation doesn't really change anything. A coder that wants to obfuscate things could already run their own interpreter and/or use asm.js.

HandBrake suffers from the same problems as FFmpeg to a lesser extent. I have no idea what options I should be selecting to get the max quality, smallest file size for a conversion.

The presets are useful but when I'm converting an old WMV or some other ancient format I want to know that I'm not leaving anything behind.

"Regular" people don't really need FFMPEG. Regular people need tools with GUIs that have a non-generic purpose. So stuff like https://kdenlive.org/en/ that are backed by ffmpeg are (imo) superior "regular" person tools.

FFMPEG isn't complicated (its as complicated as any other CLI tool), it's that video encoding/decoding specifically is a hard problem space that you have to explicitly learn to better understand what ffmpeg can do. I think if someone spent an hour learning about video codecs, bitrates, and container formats, they would immediately feel "better" at ffmpeg despite not learning more about the tool itself.

I mean, we have, what, 15+ years of StackOverflow posts to tell us what the common use cases are, e.g. "how do I make a GIF from this short screen cap?"; surely FFmpeg could offer prompt-based wizards for that kind of low hanging fruit.

Why should it, though? It's like saying that CPUs should offer high-level OOP primitives. It's just the wrong layer of abstraction. Let FFmpeg focus on offering the features, and let others build on that to abstract it all away into easy-to-user workflows.

≥ "If this tool a) was updated regularly b) had a nicer, non-CLI UI for everyday users and c) was available at an easily-Googlable domain name - it would solve all the problems I mentioned above."

No matter how nice you make it, it will probably still lose the SEO battle against the shitty ad-ladden sites fighting to win top place for google searches of "convert X to mp3"/etc.

That's probably true. In my ideal world, the OSS community comes together in a suite of offline-first, in-browser alternatives to common user needs. We need a site for document conversion (using WASM Pandoc?), PDF merging, image conversion, text utils (lower case, spell check). All these would live on one trusted site. Hopefully users can discover the site and be done searching, and spread its name by word of mouth.

I had to merge a bunch of PDFs for a rental application recently and it was painful. Having to upload very sensitive docs, every site being a funnel to their paid version, etc.

In the past I've used ghostscript to merge PDFs, but it's not user friendly of course. I do like your idea of one site hosting these sort of FOSS utilities with nice wrappers.

How is performance? Right now I use Handbrake to do video optimization. However, I'm not a video expert and all the options are pretty daunting to me. I don't know how to get the right mix of optimization without having the video encoding take forever. I would guess running the conversion in browser would just make everything slower. I wish there was something simpler for video, like ImageOptim. Just drag the video in and it compresses it using the best options based on compatibility needs.

Handbrake uses ffmpeg under the hood for much of its activities:

> https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/1.3.0/technical/source-formats....

"One of HandBrake’s strengths is its ability to open a wide variety of video formats. HandBrake uses FFmpeg under the hood and generally can open whatever FFmpeg will, in addition to disc-based formats like DVD and Blu-ray."

The options Handbrake exposes are essentially the ffmpeg flags. The built in presets in Handbrake are generally pretty sensible IMO and I've rarely had to deviate.

If it's 2-3x of native code, that's plenty good enough. Everyone uses Handbrake in an async mode - just set up the conversion and let it run overnight.

Of course, a website would be better for smaller conversion jobs (in case you have browser restarts or whatnot). Desktop apps can block computer restarts to a greater degree than websites.

ffmpeg wasm is very slow in the browser. Users would still use those terrible websites because they wouldn't be terribly slow

I don't think users can distinguish a "local" website with a public one. So this software should just come with the OS as a "movie maker" package. As mentioned Handbrake UIs are a decent candidate.

I think OSs are generally over bundling helpful software, unless its a funnel to a paid version. The security risk is too high, and so is the legal risk of anti-monopoly action ("why are you killing independent movie editor businesses?").

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