Andrew_W

Man, with all of the anti-user "features" of social sharing apps, your interface is a breath of fresh air!

I'll be trying out the open source version this weekend so I can share links with my nerdy friends more easily, but trying out the saas version really showed how horrible social share sites are these days.

I also took a peak at your code and saw the manifest. This would be a pretty awesome PWA :)

I hope you keep at it!

This is awesome! Good job on it :) Wish you had a mailing list signup - I don't want to forget about this!

I took a one month Spanish class in Mexico a few years ago. It was amazing for giving me a solid base, and your tool would be perfect for getting regular practice in and learning new things.

Definitely agree with the other comments that a more modern book would be better. For me, probably a children's book haha. I can't imagine how much time it takes to translate though!

Idea:

- Create a list of a few books you could translate.

- Allow users to donate and select the book it would go towards.

- When donations reach the threshold, they're charged and you write it.

Like Kickstarter for book translations haha. Or maybe Patreon or something has that feature.

Yeah, and Spectre/Meltdown haven't helped.

There are some pretty crazy security restrictions (no external scripts!) just to get ffmpeg running. I can't imagine the additional security precautions that would prevent exploits for WebGPU.

Definitely a performance hit! Probably a combination of the lack of hardware acceleration and running in a JS virtual machine.

I haven't checked the exact hit, but that's mostly because our focus for this tool was on people who would never touch ffmpeg or a command line.

Also, the alternative for us would've been to upload remotely and run on Lambda or similar, which I think would lack hardware acceleration as well.

Sorry for not responding sooner.

That sounds like a great use case for us to handle! Although I think ffmpeg in the browser loses some efficiency over the command line.

I think we added cropping as a possible future feature. I'll bet ffmpeg makes that really easy to do.

I think we should also work on optimizing the output size. I think we use a pretty high (err, low) -crf, which can result in ridiculous file sizes.

Thanks for the comment! Appreciate hearing use cases :)

Nope! It's all running client-side, so it uses a bit more bandwidth, but there's no way a serverless platform can compete with the cost :)

If the tool is popular long term, we might do a serverless option to make it accessible to Safari users or something though.

Interesting idea, like append the video to itself but reversed for a clean loop? I like this idea :)

True! When I first started building a video creation app, I was flailing around with google searches to find snippets to use. It was such a relief to spend an hour reading ffmpeg docs to understand how it works.

And I'm still learning a ton :)

Oh, no, I have nothing there, sorry! haha

I'm using ffmpeg.wasm, it's basically ffmpeg compiled for the browser, and it's a simple layer where you basically treat it like the ffmpeg command, eg:

ffmpeg.run(['-i', 'input.gif', ..., 'output.gif').then(() => { // handle output file })

Emailing you now :)

If you send me an e-mail (andrew@<domain in link>), I can dig in a bit more and let you know when I add it :)

Hey, this feedback is great! And it isn't even too difficult to add - we have live clipped playback in our main app.

When it failed to load the video, did it show a convert option that failed to load it as well? I think there are some limitations to the ffmpeg.wasm compile. Do you know the extension, or any details of the codecs, etc?

That's awesome! Do you have an example ffmpeg command you run?

We're trying to keep this tool super simple for our end users, but I think we might be able to add a webm preset.

If you'd like me to look into it, drop me an email: andrew@<domain in link> and show me a sample command :)

Seriously! We were trying to build our video editor in the same style (eg like tinypng and GIF optimizers).

It's so cool to do it all in the browser!

I even built a simple landing page creator that let you change text and images, then created a zip file that you could extract to your web host - no backend needed!

I think for me, CORS is the biggest hindrance to some of my ideas, esp. around editing, creation, and working with the content.

Yeah. My biggest question when I started building this was whether there was enough in the wasm to support the features we wanted to build.

I've been really happy with the results so far!

Yeah, webm is already built in to ffmpeg, we just had a pretty limited focus for our initial release.

Even our mp4s aren't very well-optimized right now.

If you work with video a bit and think this tool might be helpful to you, let me know!

Yeah, that's definitely an issue!

We had to "optimize" loading it twice.

The first time, I moved it from auto-loading to when the user clicks convert to save on bandwidth.

The second time, I moved it to after a file is selected. That gives it time to load while users are presented with options before converting.

It's definitely a trade-off. For us, the choice was easy-ish because we want to keep the budget down as Indie Hackers, so we can't just offer a free tool that costs a ton in backend/serverless charges.

Oh that tool is neat, and they have a super slick UI!

Our tool definitely isn't as slick, but I think that has its benefits too. Like our trim interface doesn't look as nice, but shows a live preview of where you're at in the video.

I want their UI and style haha

Yeah, SharedArrayBuffers have been back and forth!

- First they were disabled due to Spectre. - Chrome reenabled them. - New HTTP headers were added for cross-origin resource partitioning. - FF/Chrome are both requiring those headers (FF now, Chrome next month)

That's awesome that you've played around with this, too. It was quite a bit of fun :)

Sorry if you were having trouble because the website was down. We upgraded the server and it seems to be doing a little better!

But also get it if you mean you're not in a good place to test the tool at the moment haha

Thanks! DO made it kind of easy to upgrade the virtual machine haha.

It's up - for now :)

Uggh yes. Which is awesome, but... damn! haha

Might need to delete and repost later?

* VM is upgraded - we're back :) *

Hi HN,

I love new web tech, and was excited to see ffmpeg ported to WebAssembly so decided to build a free tool that uses it to:

- Clip/trim videos - Overlay text and images - Resize - Create GIFs or convert to a web-friendly MP4

All of this done in your browser, without ever uploading a file to a web server! (* Except Safari, it doesn't support SharedArrayBuffers)

A little more:

I've been building a video creation app with my cofounder, and being a 2-man team, we wanted to think outside of the box on an "eng as marketing" strategy.

As a techy on a budget, ffmpeg.wasm sounded like the perfect library to make a powerful free tool without requiring a ton of server resources.

So we looked up some common tasks people want to do with videos and set out to build a quick tool to accomplish them.

I think there's a ton more we can build into this - it's been about a 2 week project, but thought it was cool enough to do an initial release now.

Hope you like it, and have suggestions on what we can improve!

Some local San Diego IndieHackers and I were excited when MicroConf released all of their talks, but we wanted a way to easily filter through talks on specific topics.

So we decided to build it. Using no-code (Webflow with Jetboost), we categorized all of the videos and made them easily searchable.

Search by title or speaker Filter by year (2012-2020) Filter by edition (Keynote, Attendee Talk, etc) Filter by tag (Bootstrapping, Marketing, User Feedback, etc)

With no-code tools, we were able to get the list imported and searchable with a couple hours of work. The hardest part was making sure all of the talks were tagged well, which was hours of manual labor.

Hey everyone!

I've built an app that uses the browser and CSS styling to create videos (mp4/gif), meant for stuff like landing pages and social media. I've wanted to improve presentation and engagement in the projects and products I build, and more video seemed like one of the pieces to that puzzle.

As a solo developer, I thought it would be impossible to build a video app, so I leveraged everything I could to make it happen. The biggest tool I leveraged was the browser - letting it handle elements, layouts, styles, and animation so I could generate videos. Because I use the browser, any css/js I add to the frontend UI automatically work in the backend and renderer.

How To Video Showing the App: https://static.brisa.io/videos/getting-started.mp4

If you've got an open source/indie hacker project you'd like a video for, let me know and I'll try to help out!