[speps]

First, should've been "Show HN" thread.

Second, could you explain some use case? GitHub has these limits for a reason, and there's probably better ways to host a 350MB video if you need it to be played on GitHub.

Third, if I understand right the whole thing looks quite complex when you could just give someone a simple guide on what ffmpeg invocation needs to be done.

[Lance13c]

1. Thanks for the info, this is my first time posting on hacker news.

2. BossingAround explains it fairly well. It is really about breaking out of Github. When you only want to quickly upload a video, and it break because of 7 extra MB, thats annoying. If you were to use ffmpeg, manually you need to do a few things.

First, you need to know where the video you just recorded is located which may takes you 10 seconds of brain power.

Second, you need to grab the script to compress the video from your notes, or use a alias/macro. (1-5 seconds)

Third you need to find the output video, then drag it back into Github. About (3-10) seconds.

This does not include the actual compressing time.

While this app you install once, and it should just work. When you drop a video into the Github comment field or description box, it will start compressing, then upload like normal. All while the developer can edit the text field. There is little break of the dev's flow.

If you care about maintaining the full 350MB, you can for sure post the video somewhere else, but that takes time, breaks dev flow, and is often not free to host 350MB files. In this use-case the important part is not to maintain the video quality, but that I can still understand and read the text/context in the video.

Also, another use-case for this is to keep these video's off external services. To keep the attack surface area down. The importance of this depends on your own company.

Third. The code is stupidly complex for such a simple thing (I definitely asked myself why am I building this over 20 times), but the actual use and installation of the app is super simple. Installation should take under 10 to 20 minutes. Most of the time is from installing ffmpeg. I tried really hard to make installation as easy as possible.

Once installed, app should just work. You should never need to think about anything. Install once and forget.

[BossingAround]

The use case is pretty much the 3rd sentence in the link:

> It is helpful if you accidentally record more than 100MB (the github limit) for a demo video you wish to put in a Github PR.

In other words, you have a video, you want to attach it to the PR, it's 105MB. Now your option is to put it on YT and share a link, or use this tool and be able to simply drag/drop it to the PR.

In the demo, the 118MB file is compressed to something like 18MB, which is quite impressive, and could also help people who have slow upload speeds.

[Lance13c]

Exactly, thanks for explaining BossingAround.

It is a small niche use-case, but something I personally run into more often than not.

Other alternatives is use ffmpeg on your own, or use one of the thousand video tools on the market to compress the video. This is what I did in the past, but it made me open an external tool, then compress, then re-upload. It was an annoying 20-30 seconds of my time.

This keeps devs in the Github PR flow without thinking too much, which I find quite nice. I personally have been using this for 2ish months now since version 0.0.1. It is always a pleasant surprise when it works.

[operator-name]

I often to this manually, using Handbrake before uploading screen recordings.

Screen recording software trade performance for file size, so reencoding it afterwards can result in much smaller file sizes. I've personally had recordings I ~100MB reencode to ~10MB.