“Users who in the past would type ‘free online file converter’ into a search engine are vulnerable, as the algorithms used for results now often include paid results, which might be scams.”
Nooo, you mean turning search engines into monetization and ad delivery engines had downsides? Who would have thought!
Fucking greed at the root of another goddamned issue…
That’s why I always prefer an offline converter. Also if your upload a file somewhere the website can save it for their own purpose alhough they say they won’t do it.
Precisely, and this is why I’ve never trusted online “free” converters since day one. Who the fuck knows what they’re actually doing with your file, and I always assumed that most of them were fronts to steal data and IP from users who are stupid enough to upload corporate and business stuff to them.
Anyway, there’s vanishingly little I haven’t been able to do over the years with ffmpeg or Imagemagick, their byzantine command line structures notwithstanding.
Which is why I’ve been happy to trust them for files nobody cares about, like a random audio file that I got off the Internet. And it’s very unlikely they’d be able to exploit my media player.
The website mentions that there are fake offline converters that push malware as well.
I tend to just whip up a script of some sort that employs widely used libraries for the conversion. I know that’s more technical than most people would have the tolerance or aptitude for, but for me, it’s the least ambiguous and most secure way to do stuff like that. And then I can squirrel it away in a utility scripts directory and use it later if I need it again.
Which offline converter? I find myself often trying to convert:
- PDF to JPEG
- AVC to MP4
- OPUS to MP3
etc. I have no idea how to do that but if I type it into a search engine there’s usually tools there.
FFmpeg and handbrake do the latter two quite handily. The latter even has a nice program interface, rather than needing commands.
ImageMagick is capable of the first. I’ve had it go the other way before, and I should be most surprised if it couldn’t convert a PDF to a jpg.
I don’t have the knowledge or the time to learn to use these tools.
Then I suppose you’re up shit creek.
Thanks for that deep analysis.
Let me tell you a little bit about all those various file converter tools, be it ffmpeg, pandoc, imagemagick, whatever.
The majority of them can be used like this:
magick inputfile.bmp outputfile.jpg.If all you need is this file in that format, that’s how you do it. They’re ridicluously capable, you can do editing and compositing and such with them and whatever. If you have a use case where you do that a lot, like you just always put a watermark on images or you always desaturate them or whatever, you can write a script, then just run that script.They’re basically all like that. Fairly simple to use for basic format translation, shockingly capable if you want to write a script.
magick inputfile.bmp outputfile.jpg.
Handbrake has a GUI, and it’s relatively straightforward to use. VLC also works well. You can also use ffmpeg on the CLI like so:
ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 output_video.aviimagemagick isn’t really that hard, in most cases it’s:
convert <file1> <file2>For example:
convert file.pdf file.jpgIf that doesn’t work, try
pdftoppm:pdftoppm input.pdf outputname -pngI don’t know of a good GUI for it, I recommend just learning to use either imagemagick or pdftoppm.
Handbrake has a GUI, and it’s relatively straightforward to use
I downloaded it and it immediately did not work so I’m gonna have to disagree with you there, champ.
You can also use ffmpeg on the CLI like so:
I’ve lost far too many hours to the CLI. I don’t fall for that trick anymore.
You do you, I guess. Those are incredibly simple commands I provided, and you can intuit pretty easily how to tweak them for other formats.
I guess it’s up to you. You can gamble with random services online, or you can spend a few minutes and learn to use a tool that’s all but guaranteed to not have malware.
or you can spend a few minutes
This is just a fucking lie and I’m tired of hearing it. What did I just say?
I’ve lost far too many hours to the CLI.
I’ve tried to learn this shit. It’s a fucking rabbit hole. I type these commands, letter for letter, the terminal returns some completely useless error that provides me with no diagnostic information whatsoever, I spend hours searching and trying to understand why and come up empty-handed. I don’t have time for that anymore. I already have multiple jobs. It’s not how I prefer to spend my free time. And frankly, I don’t believe it anymore when software engineers feed me this bullshit.
You know what those web services do? I just click a button and it does what the button says. Why is that so hard?
It is indeed very difficult to type convert 001.jpg example.pdf and ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
imagemagick handles almost all image files
images ) ls 001.jpg 002.jpg 003.jpg 004.jpg 005.jpg images ) convert 001.jpg example.pdfffmpeg handles almost all video files
ex ) ls rock.mp4 ex ) ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.aviif you use gnome there’s a nice little feature of the file explorer where you can just drag and drop scripts into
~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/for example
make a fish script (ignoring error checking for brevity here, my real script had a couple guard rails)
/#!/usr/bin/env fish set file $argv[1] convert $file (basename $file .png).pdfthen when you right click on a file in your gnome file explorer you can click the scripts option
and the script is right there so you can just easily convert with the press of a button
note, i crossed out some stuff that includes client names
tldr: there are so many ways to do what you need to do there’s no reason to trust random websites you don’t know. there’s a lot of slimey people out there wanting to take advantage of people. and everybody should strive to be at least a little computer literate. the examples i gave here aren’t complicated. they’re simple commands
That’s a pretty sweet feature in GNOME! I’ll need to see if there is something similar for KDE.
PDF to JPEG
Don’t most pdf viewers have an export to image option?
AVC to MP4
Do you actually have files with an .avc extension? AVC is a codec that can be used in many different container formats, including MP4. Where did these files come from?
OPUS to MP3
I actually agree that most audio conversion tools are needlessly awkward. Audacity will convert these just fine, though doesn’t really do bulk conversion. Foobar2000 will do it in bulk if you’re on windows.
On the PDF to JPEG, you can also open the PDFs with an image editor, such as Inkscape or krita, and then save the image on the format and quality needed. This method also has the benefit that on some cases you play with the assets if needed. (Depends on how was the PDF generated)
You could try Permute. It’s a pretty simple app for converting video and audio. Permute is my go-to for quick video conversion.
DBPowerAmp has an easy-to-use audio converter that supports pretty much every audio format and does batch file conversion as well. DBPowerAmp is my go-to for audio conversion.
Both of these are paid apps.
I can’t comment on the others, but PDF to JPEG should be easy enough. ImageMagick, which another commenter suggested, is possible but not user friendly. However you can just open the PDF in many applications and export it as an image. Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop can do it. GIMP probably too.
I’m a last ditch effort you can even just open the file and screenshot it.
Open/Libreoffice can do that too
In Windows, Foobar2000 does easy audio file conversions, once you have installed the relevant codecs.
Video and audio conversion can be done with Handbrake or Shutter Encoder, both are nice GUIs
Protip: ask your favourite llm to write you a python script to convert between the formats you’re interested in. Bonus benefit: simultaneously learn a bit about programming!
As much as I’m not a fan of this, I’ll at least admit it was helpful in helping me quickly learn how to scale videos using FFMPEG. That, combined with the documentation and now I have a command saved to a reference text document to help if I ever forget.
I have zero interest in learning all the intricacies of ffmpeg so I find ChatGPT to be very useful. I’ve also used it for yt-dlp for downloading videos and converting the audio to mp3. Very useful. I personally save them as bash scripts so I can just input the file name or url as a command line argument. On Mac you can also wrap your bash scripts in AppleScript if you want to make applets for these functions. ChatGPT works great for apple script as well but I’ve had to feed it source code (eg from Apple Digital Mastering applets) to ensure it writes the new code correctly. You still must know what you’re doing.
Is yt-dlp really that difficult that you can’t take ten min to learn the syntax? Do you not worry that you might end up relying on this stuff too much?
For example, I know I’m completely reliant on GPS, and I would be useless without it
The syntax is easy, but the options change a bit depending on what you want to do. My entire job I requires me to use my brain so I don’t mind cheating when it doesn’t really matter as in this case. In my case I wanted a SQLite database to store URLs and playlist IDs for recording attempts and to make sure I don’t download the same video multiple times. I think I also had songs run thru music brainz for audio fingerprinting and mp3 tags. ChatGPT doesn’t get it right the first time but often gives a reasonable boilerplate piece of code as a template to start from.
Ffmprg is remarkably powerful. If it is a picture on your screen, you can use ffmpeg to do what you want to it. Recently discovered it could convert PNG, jpeg, and webp images back and forth. To think I’ve only used it for video.
I’d recommend some CLI utility to a beginner over Python: pandoc, ffmpeg, image magic…
True, that’s a good point :)
“Users who in the past would type ‘free online file converter’ into a search engine are vulnerable, as the algorithms used for results now often include paid results, which might be scams.”
Mm hmm.
I refuse to believe that the free service I’ve been using for years has been exploiting my behavior for money… what kind of world is this?? What kind of psychopathic organization would do such a thing? Why isn’t capitalism working for me? Why?
The best is online CSR generators.
Yes, I know people who have implemented private keys they have been given from random websites.
I’m… Wut… Just…
WHAT THE FUCK?
What? Just base64 encrypt it before you store it in the git hub
And a new migraine ensues
That’s why I only use totallylegitfileconverter.ru they even have a lottery where they can directly transfer the money to your bank account when you win. They’re very friendly!
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