Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Retr0id 699 days ago
I 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-encode. It might be worth adding logic to merely remux i.e. "-vcodec copy" where possible, as an optimisation.

Consider adding HEIC/HEIF image support, as well as JXL. Slightly less common, but all the more reason why someone would want to convert.

2 comments

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

> 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.