Honey, I Shrunk The Vids [Mr. Universe Edition] v1.0.5

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨obelisk_complex@piefed.ca⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal

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). 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.

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Comments

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hietsu@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yes, I used Claude to help me build this, but it’s not “barely tested”. The major features all work, and they didn’t at first; I hunted down bugs, told Claude to shove it when it was wrong, and manually applied fixes so I could be sure I understood what went wrong and why. This was first and foremost a learning experience for me. And I’m actively using this thing to batch transcode my media right now, because my learning experience has resulted in something that works.
  
  If you find issues, by all means let me know and I’ll do my best to fix them - but stow the attitude, I didn’t invite you to this party and I’m not contract-bound to offer you support. If you don’t wanna be here, you can kindly fuck straight off.
  
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  - non_burglar@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
    
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sockenklaus@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?

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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Weird, I’m seeing it load fine in a fresh Incognito window: image
  
  Can you shoot over a screenshot with the URL you’re visiting?
  
  And, it’s actually also on Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/dorkian_gray/histv-universal
  
  But yes, I did create a GitHub account just because it can build binaries for a wide range of systems; the binaries are currently only available on Github. I have been running into Codeberg’s availability issues so I’m now glad I’ve got both 😅
  
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  - guynamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    It loads fine for me! It seems like it’s just an issue with the commenter’s setup
    
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  - Im_old@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The problem is that the . (full stop) at the end of the sentence is also in the hyperlink.
    
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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I haven’t seen an app name that funky since the late 90s or so. 😃

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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  lol I’ll take that as high praise, as everyone knows the 1990s were the peak of our civilisation!
  
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phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

built with AI

Bye!

No no no, keep reading, it’s awesome!

It’s not, it’s slop

Byes

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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  No worries, go ahead and block me - I’m already returning the favour.
  
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  - phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Make sure to use AI for that!
    
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GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

Built with assistance from Claude, but don’t let that stop you reading

too late

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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  No worries, go ahead and block me - I’m already returning the favour.
  
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  - GreenKnight23@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    bye
    
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yakko@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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!

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- GreenCrunch@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
  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.
  
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  - yakko@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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!
    
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Mubelotix@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

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

Thank you for your service

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prenatal_confusion@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Thanks mate! It’s been a rough as hell week at work and getting it when I’m trying to share my hobby work with people was unexpected and a little demoralising, so your comment is really nice to read and much appreciated 😊
  
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polle@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Wierd flex mentioning that its made with ai.

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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  See, I got yelled at for not marking it as AI-assisted, and now you’re in here thinking it’s a flex! I just can’t win 😅
  
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  - polle@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Probably (mostly) everyone hates ai generated stuff.
    
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SnailMagnitude@mander.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
This guy blocks everyone who doesn’t like his AI mess. Interesting

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NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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- obelisk_complex@piefed.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It’s no worries mate, as mentioned I have no problem with questions!
  
  So, reasons. Yes, this started as a line in powershell! That was my other post, linked at the top. I wrote the line, and after a few batches I decided to stop and use Claude to build a GUI for it. After I got that working and did a few runs with it, I started thinking about how useful this would be for a handful of other people in my life, and I wanted to package it into a .exe, partly so I could send them something simple to start but also just because I wondered if I could get it working. Never done it before. I still wanted to use it for myself because 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.
  
  Then, later that night after I’d done a few batches with the powershell line-now-script, I thought to myself that Claude could probably help me build a frontend for it that didn’t rely on powershell, and then I started thinking about just making it a cross-platform application so my less techie friends can use it if they have big video files and want to save disk space. And then I got the bright idea to post it to the internet in case there are other less-techie users who aren’t my friends but who could still use it.
  
  It’s got some smarts under the hood to detect any hardware encoders you have available, and will present only the encoders that your system can use; the options are INCREDIBLY constrained, because the idea isn’t to expose every option of FFMPEG - this is for quickly shrinking video files without even needing to know the difference between CBR and VBR. That’s because you and I think it’s easy to run an FFMPEG command from the commandline. But there are a lot of people of all different kinds of skill levels who have no idea how any of that works, and they’ll take one look at Handbrake and run screaming. This is for those people, too.
  
  It also auto-downloads the latest FFMPEG and FFProbe from the official source if it doesn’t detect them on your PATH or in the folder with the executable - that saved my buddy who was helping me test it on his 2016 Mac, for example.
  
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  - NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
    
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