Good catch! Didn’t see til I looked at it on my phone, wasn’t happening on my desktop. Fixed.

My advice would be to try transcoding one or two media files first, and test the transcode on different devices. HISTV gives a lot fewer options than Handbrake, but the idea is minimal effort, maximal compatibility.

Specifically, AV1 is a newer standard, and not supported on devices older than ~2020 I think. HEVC (aka x265) produces slightly larger files but works on devices back to 2016 or so, and MP4/H.264 gives yet bigger files but compatibility goes back even further.

For video file size the main things you want to set are the target bitrate and, secondarily, the QP numbers: https://www.w3tutorials.net/blog/what-s-the-difference-with-crf-and-qp-in-ffmpeg/#quantization-parameter-qp-definition--how-it-works

For good quality at a reasonable size you can use the default values of 20/22 but to save a little more space you can probably bump these to 24/26. I went with QP instead of CRF because it’s better for streaming (while still giving better perceived quality than a constant bit rate).

As I say, Handbrake is great, does all this and more, but that was my problem with it - the controls look like something out of a space shuttle and I just don’t need all that most of the time 😅 I’d love to hear how you find using HISTV vs Handbrake, if you give it a go! 🙌

Thanks! Absolutely, I’ll add those screenshots to the original repo tomorrow. In the meantime, you may wish to check out the update thread I just posted: https://piefed.ca/c/selfhosted/p/571213/honey-i-shrunk-the-vids-mr-universe-edition-v1-0-5

And the new version can be found here: https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal

I think the update looks even better, and it’s cross-platform now!

Edit: oh right, license. It’s under The Unlicense. Do whatever, dawg 😊

Edit: Found the issue and the link you meant thanks to another commenter, fixed!

And, it’s actually also on Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/dorkian_gray/histv-universal

But yes, I did create a GitHub account just because it can build binaries for a wide range of systems; the binaries are currently only available on Github. I’m trying to figure out how to create a release on Codeberg, but if it’s in the Tags, every time I click into one I get a 502 Bad Gateway, soooo… I think it’s safe to say that I have been running into Codeberg’s availability issues, and I’m now glad I’ve got both 😅

It’s not that I need it to be perfect, it’s that I need to make sure I can get my environment running for work on Monday 😅 But thanks, I’m excited that it’s even a feasible option!

That’s exactly what this is part of! HISTV is the fruit of one of my many explorations, and that genesis is part of why I posted this in a selfhosting comm.

As to escaping Windows entirely, thanks to Valve’s work on the Proton layer I can feasibly switch to daily driving some flavour of Linux. Soon. I just need to metaphorically get off my ass and trial it out for a few days on a live boot USB to work out any bugbears before making the actual switch (for personal reasons, I’m going to be starting from scratch and setting my environment up right, so it has to go smoothly).

Lol cheers bru, appreciate the solidarity 🙌

Oh! Apologies, I wasn’t directing that at you. I see how it came off that way though; my tone was meant to be self-deprecating. By the last bit I just meant I saw a downvote or two. Could be any reason for those, or none at all.

TIL, cheers! That’s pretty awesome. Now that this is working, I’ll probably drop it entirely and move on to learning Tdarr, I’m really curious how the network compute works 😅

Yep. I didn’t scope out and build that one though. Also I didn’t get to name it, which in hindsight was obviously a terrible mistake.

This isn’t better than Handbrake. It’s simpler, though. Also, as I said in another comment, I wanted to see if I could get it to work - it was as much personal challenge as anything.

And I got it working, and I’m proud of my dumb little first project, so I posted about it. There seem to be some people think I shouldn’t have done that last bit, though.

Thanks! Yeah, that’s pretty much my exact use case lol. I can’t run the transcode on my server for various reasons so I have to do it on my local machine. Dunno if tdarr supports that. Probably should have found out before rolling my own, but I wanted to see if I could do it 😅

She’s gonna have power over your employment; if you don’t trust her not to use that to fuck with you (and it sounds like you can’t), don’t go work there. You’ll be able to find a position elsewhere.