- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
Me again :P
Honey, I Shrunk The Vids is a streamlined video conversion tool built on FFMPEG, with smarts built in for standardising all files put through it to a standard target bitrate into either .mp4 or .mkv containers, in either h.264 or HEVC format. Comes in GUI for desktop and CLI for headless operation. The idea is that you can point it at a folder full of folders full of videos and hit “Start”, and trust that when it’s through you’ll have videos compatible with devices back to ~2014, smaller (or at least no bigger) than they were before, and with accurate MKV tags where appropriate.
The application has gone through some more major revisions since my last post, and I thought people would like to know! The first thing you’ll notice is the visual refresh:
Screenshots
There are no more menu tabs; all options are exposed in a single side panel. Also, I added exotic filetypes for inputs: mts, mpg, mpeg, vob, flv, 3gp, 3g2, ogv, rmvb, rm, asf, f4v, y4m, apng, webp. That’s right, you can convert basically anything FFMPEG supports to convert to MKV or MP4!
I’m particularly proud of the webp support. FFMPEG can’t decode animated WebP natively (or at least, the most popular binaries can’t; maybe someone has a fork that’s fixed it), so HISTV:
- Parses the RIFF container itself,
- Decodes each frame through ffmpeg’s static WebP decoder,
- Composites them with correct alpha blending and disposal, and
- Pipes the result to the encoder.
Temp files are completely avoided for storage/IO reasons; variable frame timing is preserved, so smooth per-frame progress is retained from source.
The one filetype I left out was .yuv, because that’s raw data, no container or headers, and the user would have to enter the correct dimensions for each video (which defeats the core purpose of Honey, I Shrunk The Vids, so it’s out of scope for this project).
The theme engine has been simplified, with only 6 keys down from 16, and everything named more intuitively so it’s easier to tell what changes what. As well, a Linux user reported their FFMPEG wasn’t discovered properly, so ffmpeg discovery now uses login-shell PATH resolution (previously macOS only), fixing detection when ffmpeg is installed to locations like ~/.local/bin.
Bunch of bugs got squished (for example the encoder would switch when toggling the new “Precision Mode” checkbox), and several more efficiency passes were made with more hand-edits than ever. This is the cleanest, leanest build yet, and the most featureful.
Finally, I added “-full” versions for each platform. These come bundled with FFMPEG, if you want just a single download.
Also, I’ve flirted with the idea of signing the Windows executable so Windows Defender stops complaining about it, but I don’t yet see a reason to give Microsoft money for that. You can just click “More Info”, and then “Run Anyway”.
I’m running out of ideas for future updates, but if anyone has requests just drop a comment or open up an issue! And, as always, I’m here for questions. I hope you find it useful!
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One thing I’d like to see from an app like this is “force the video into an arbitrary file size limit” with a list of priorities to do so defined by the user. Say I’ve got a video I want to send over Discord (10mb limit) but I’m not intending for the vid to be fullscreened by the recipient so scaling it down to like 480x480 would be fine.
Any plans for a flatpak by chance?
There are now!
Thanks. I have trust issues so I don’t typically install software directly off someones github. I know flatpak/flathub isnt perfect but if its a verified flatpak then I at least know someone smarter than me at least reviewed the project and additionally, I know I can restrict the applications permissions with flatseal.
As someone who has been obsessed (read: a perfectionist) with video encoding for the longest time, this looks incredible. Nice work! I’ll give it a shot!
Sweet as mate, cheers for the kind words! I hope it’s useful - and if you run into any issues, or think of a feature you’d like to see, please do let me know. Bugs get fixed ASAP, and I always promise I’ll at least consider new features because I’m having a lot of fun working on this thing! 😁
- Love the project name.
- This looks close to what I’ve imagined coalescing my hand conjured ffmpeg scripts into.
- I’d like to feed this into a pipeline that includes Subler or equivalent.
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Thank you! I am obnoxiously proud of myself for that one 😅
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That’s actually how this all started for me haha! I was sitting there tweaking the same command as I hit videos with different formats or quality levels, and I thought to myself that it’d be a lot easier with just a few smarts like detecting if a video is already at the target quality level. The first version was actually just a winforms GUI wrapping that very PowerShell command - it’s come a long way in just a few weeks.
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Subler is interesting! Hmm. Currently HISTV just copies over ask the subtitle tracks directly. I think I could add a subtitle function like Subler’s to bake in subtitle tracks, if the user has the subtitle file they want to use. Would that be useful? Metadata download from the internet is messy though, I might want to leave that to the existing *arr solutions.
I use Subler mostly as a metadata acquisition and injector tool, and secondarily as a M4V remux sanitiser. The subtitles function is more a subset of its stream management, and is much less relevant than its name implies. That said, it does do a very competent job at converting, through OCR, DVD and BluRay bitmap subtitles to ASCII variants required for MP4 containers.
I think it only works in macOS, which makes it difficult to understand its purpose when you don’t have that platform readily available. Ideally it would have a CLI/TUI which would lend it better to script integration.
Yeah, it’s early and I was just skimming the docs for it as I don’t have a Mac. I’ll think about the metadata downloader; it does have a place, arguably, as related to the mkv tag repair I built in.
As to the CLI, HISTV does have one! It’s a standalone binary but it uses the same Rust backend as the GUI for feature parity and maintainability 😊
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Has anyone tried this? OP, have you? Is it fast? I have a tv show that I’ve ripped from blue-ray. It is 600GB and I wanted to save some space, but whenever I try to convert, it’s awfully slow. I have a pretty beefy setup, Ryzen 7 5800xt CPU and a 9070xt GPU.
Haha yes, I use it regularly! And yes, it’ll be plenty fast on your system. I have very deliberately gone over the code base looking for inefficiencies six times now, so it runs nice and lean - I do an efficiency/hygiene pass every couple of releases to make sure bloat doesn’t creep in.
As [email protected] said, CPU encoding is slow but it preserves the most quality. No kidding, it really is night and day compared to GPU encoding - for this, just tick “Precision mode” in HISTV. It’s about 1x speed on most videos, so a 45 minute file will take about 45 minutes.
GPU does go a lot faster, my 7900 XTX rips through 1080p at about 28x speed so a 45 minute file takes about 2 minutes. This is good enough for most content; just untick “precision mode” and set the multiplier to 2x or 3x with a bitrate of 4 if you want better GPU quality in HISTV. The multiplier says how high the peak bitrate can go, so you keep more data for fast-moving scenes, without forcing the encoder to keep useless data for slow scenes.
afaik if you want to retain as much quality as possible while saving space you do want to do it on the CPU (so not hw accelerated - slow)
Nice job and congrats on the webp parser. You made Converseen but for videos :)
Windows cert -> you can also give your money to other companies, the cert doesn’t need to be from MS. But who cares, ask Windows users to buy it for you if they choose to continue using that OS.
Thank you very much, that’s very kind! 😊
I didn’t know I could get the cert from elsewhere, I appreciate the heads up; my experience lies mainly in networking, rather than software. I’ll open that possibility back up, then. It’d be a first for me, and I’m getting a real taste for firsts with this project!
I’m not taking anyone’s money, though, even Windows users (right now, that includes me… I’m working on it lol). I’m doing this purely for the love of the game!
Good luck with your eventual transition to Linux! Check in with Lemmy communities if you want help with anything!
Since you’re still a Windows user at least for now, and assuming that you’re planning on continuing to be open-source, I can recommend Certum for this. https://shop.certum.eu/open-source-code-signing.html
I gave up trying to initialize the USB thingy using Linux (I tried regular Arch [btw] and an Ubuntu distrobox IIRC), but once I got through the initial steps using Windows, I was able to sign ongoing builds with Linux just fine. It took a LOT of trial and error since there seem to be very few people who simultaneously
- pathologically dislike using Windows regularly
- still want to make it easier for people on Windows to minimize Windows Defender complaints when running software that they build
- have the motivation and resolve to send a lot of PII to one of a handful of companies whose longtime business model is based around reputation and trust in order to get a usable certificate
- are stubborn enough to go out of their way to still figure out how to do a subset of this stuff on Linux
- are capable of actually succeeding at that, and
- are willing to show how they did it in a way that should be reasonably easy enough to understand and adapt to your situation
I didn’t renew after my first year - I switched from publishing an executable to publishing it on the web, so I no longer had a need for it - so I don’t know how things have changed (if at all). Most of my information came from eventually stumbling upon this wiki page for a Ruby-based tool where they figured out the last bits I needed to get it to work.
- It also has instructions for initializing the USB thingy on Linux too, so if I were to renew, I’d give that a fair shot… but seeing “icedtea” and a link to a web application that no longer resolves, I’d still only recommend it if you can use a Windows machine once a year.
This is super helpful (and I see that “btw”, you got a smile with that one (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞). Thank you for the heads up and all this detailed information! I’m excited to check out Certum.
there seem to be very few people who simultaneously - pathologically dislike using Windows regularly - still want to make it easier for people on Windows to minimize Windows Defender complaints when running software that they build
Describes me to a T 😅 My career is rooted in support, so my pathologies include trying to make things end-user easy.
I envy you so much, I used to love programming. Enjoy the process and the firsts!
Really cool idea, I have a basic tdarr setup which is pretty similar, do you know what other features this would have that are not found on tdarr
There really aren’t many to be honest, Tdarr is super powerful! But the setup is a lot, at least on first run. The main point of HISTV is for the times when you can’t be bothered to set up tdarr, like if you only have to do spot conversions, or for people who don’t want to learn how to use Tdarr. But there are a few features unique to HISTV!
I have built in disk space monitoring so your drive doesn’t fill up during encoding, which tdarr doesn’t do; I don’t know if tdarr supports turning gif/webp/mjpeg/apng into MP4/MKV; also, tdarr doesn’t auto detect your hardware, where HISTV does a few test transcodes on startup to determine not only what hardware is available but whether the encoder for that hardware is working.
Pretty cool project, thanks for sharing! Could this be used with Sonarr and Radarr, so newly downloaded vids get automatically converted?
Thank you! And yes, it can - you can put the HISTV command for the CLI version in a custom script in Settings -> Connect -> Custom Script:
screenshots
_Edit: I’ve got a full guide up for Sonarr/Radarr integration, which can be simple or as complicated as you want to make it, here: https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal/blob/main/Sonarr-Radarr-Integration.md_
