cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/41813614
I’m currently working on a file converter app that lets you easily convert your files in bulk without needing to mess around with 500 settings or confusing command-line apps. It’s mostly a replacement for all those “convert X to Y” websites.
This is just a front-end for ffmpeg and imagemagick, but the goal is to make something so simple even my parents could use without uploading sensitive files to shady websites on the internet. I’ve looked around, and I found all the local GUI converters like Handbrake are unwieldy to use, especially if you just want to convert in bulk.
The project is still very early, but I’d like some feedback:
Does anyone think this project is worth finishing, or are there too many GUI file converters out there already?
What do you think about the UI so far?
Cheers.
Good idea for an app. Linux especially would benefit from more high quality apps aimed at less-technical users.
Would be good to include audio-only conversion too.
Any reason not to use https://github.com/VERT-sh/VERT?
VERT is really close but not totally what I was looking for, it’s a web app rather than a local program and AFAIK can’t convert videos locally, you’d have to upload it to a server and download them again.
VERT is a file conversion utility that uses WebAssembly to convert files on your device instead of a cloud.
Doesn’t sound like you’re uploading to the server.
Video files are an exception since it would be too slow on WASM
Q: What happens with video files?
Video files get uploaded to our lightning-fast RTX 4000 Ada server. Your videos stay on there for an hour if you do not convert them. If you do convert the file, the video will stay on the server for an hour, or until it is downloaded. The file will then be deleted from our server.
Given that the server end is self-hostable one could just bundle the frontend and the backend into a single package and run that as an app. I imagine that might be a bit too much though.
You don’t even need a single app, just run it with docker compose
You can run it all locally if you want…. They’re just docker containers. Set up a docker compose and
docker compose up
A native UI would be nice, but this also works.
This looks great so far! I love the concept of an app that makes conversions easy for the most typical use cases.
It looks like you’re still early in the UI phase, so you probably have plans for this already, but I feel like the progress screen could use more feedback than only two progress bars.
Overall though, this looks like it could be solid! Good luck!
Out of topic, but how viable is godot for creating desktop/mobile apps? Can it be used for “serious” stuff, or is it more of an improvisation?
I have a whole blog post talking about using Godot for GUI development. The short of it is that it’s surprisingly good but has a few drawbacks, and it doesn’t have a bustling ecosystem like webdev tools. I’ve yet to try it on mobile, though.
Nice post! Thanks for sharing
https://materialmaker.org/ got made in it. I don’t know any other apps made in it but if it’s anyway similar to unity it’s doable
Making apps with Godot is actually very doable, it takes care of a lot of the typical annoyances involved with that process like UI layout, theme support, and cross platform distribution. The Godot language (GDScript) is very approachable and powerful, too.
The Godot editor itself is made with Godot, and here’s a few other nice examples of apps that I know of:
GodSVG
Wonderdraft (paid app)
Pixelorama
If you want honest feedback, I won’t be using it because it isn’t native. File converters are one of those things for me that I really want to compile on my hardware.
Can it convert flac to wavpack?
I love this idea.
Convert a CSV into a wmv.
