So this is ffmpeg in the cloud?
Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
11–20 of 24 posts
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#12I wish pages like this had a way to specify, in the HEAD tag, that they are to be run in an additional sandbox with zero network access. That way, the user agent could render them in a special way to indicate to the user that it is safe to share data with the app. Because nothing is stopping this app from updating its code after a few weeks in order to begin shipping data. Of course, you can download the page and the…
This would be great. However, maybe it is better to initiate sandbox via JS, after all necessary resources are loaded.
Also, maybe the user should be able to initiate offline mode for a single page.
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#13I dig the simplicity, but "mp4" for example is just a container format. Even if you don't make the codecs user-configurable, it'd be nice to know which codecs are being used e.g. "mp4 (h264 + AAC)". Question, does it strip metadata? Because ideally that's what I'd expect from a "privacy-friendly" tool. I let it "convert" one mp4 file into another, and it's taking a while, which makes me think it's doing a full re-enc…
Hey! Yea, for mp4 its just ffmpeg -i and nothing else .. Good idea to optimize this. In general ffmpeg-wasm is a lot slower than FFmpeg run on your desktop, but let me see if I can improve on this.
Performance diff: https://ffmpegwasm.netlify.app/docs/performance
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#14Using online converter is actually a good idea because it is often difficult to install tools like ffmpeg properly; for example, by default Fedora installs a version of ffmpeg which doesn't contains encoder like x264 and it requires googling and trying different commands to fix it.
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#15So this is ffmpeg in the cloud?
Looks like ffmpeg WASM, so runs in your browser
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#16So this is ffmpeg in the cloud?
Yea, it is using https://ffmpegwasm.netlify.app/ :)
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#17I wish pages like this had a way to specify, in the HEAD tag, that they are to be run in an additional sandbox with zero network access. That way, the user agent could render them in a special way to indicate to the user that it is safe to share data with the app. Because nothing is stopping this app from updating its code after a few weeks in order to begin shipping data. Of course, you can download the page and the…
In terms of version-pinning, the next-best idea I can come up with is to deploy your app as an HTML file with a single JS script, using subresource integrity[0] for the script. (The rest of the HTML content would need to be dynamically inserted by said script)
The developer can still change the HTML file, but if they change the script it's easy(ish) to observe that the hash has changed.
GitHub recently introduced[1] an "artifact attestation" system, which is essentially a way to demonstrate that a particular build was built by a particular source tree (although the precise security properties are more subtle than I've summarized here). Combining these two things and writing a static "load the most recent version and verify its integrity" script could be interesting.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Subres...
[1] https://github.blog/2024-05-02-introducing-artifact-attestat...
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#18I dig the simplicity, but "mp4" for example is just a container format. Even if you don't make the codecs user-configurable, it'd be nice to know which codecs are being used e.g. "mp4 (h264 + AAC)". Question, does it strip metadata? Because ideally that's what I'd expect from a "privacy-friendly" tool. I let it "convert" one mp4 file into another, and it's taking a while, which makes me think it's doing a full re-enc…
> Question, does it strip metadata? Because ideally that's what I'd expect from a "privacy-friendly" tool.
Why would you expect that? I expect privacy to mean that the service isn't harvesting my data. I wouldn't expect it to strip the tags from my music.
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#19Extremely convenient. Nice to see WASM is enabling such use cases. It's crazy how many online converter websites and none of them are good (ads, paid features, etc.).
My recommendation: think about PDFs. A lot of space for disrupting existing conversion websites there when it comes to speed, privacy, UI/UX. Not even anything complicated: splitting, combining, rotating, compressing, etc.
Re: Show HN: I made a privacy-friendly and free image, audio and video converter
#20I dig the simplicity, but "mp4" for example is just a container format. Even if you don't make the codecs user-configurable, it'd be nice to know which codecs are being used e.g. "mp4 (h264 + AAC)". Question, does it strip metadata? Because ideally that's what I'd expect from a "privacy-friendly" tool. I let it "convert" one mp4 file into another, and it's taking a while, which makes me think it's doing a full re-enc…
> Question, does it strip metadata? Because ideally that's what I'd expect from a "privacy-friendly" tool. Why would you expect that? I expect privacy to mean that the service isn't harvesting my data. I wouldn't expect it to strip the tags from my music.
This tool is an ergonomic replacement for things `ffmpeg` and `imagemagick`. Among the privacy-conscious, these tools are the go-to for stripping unwanted metadata, so I'd want the same from a replacement.
Of course, ffmpeg can do a lot of things, and I wouldn't expect them all to be supported. But I do expect metadata stripping (at least as an option) from a tool with privacy in the headline.