this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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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.
Yes this can also happen. I should have written open source offline converter
What you recommend in terms of offline open-source converters?
Pandoc for documents, ffmpeg for video , imagemagick for images
What are you looking to convert?
Usually what i do is look for any converter and look for open source alternatives to it on alternativeto.net and hopefully one of the top 3 alternatives fits your use case
Psst the URL is: https://alternativeto.net/ I always stop here first to research what software options there are available and also learning what other people are using. Extremely useful and trustworthy site!
Thanks i dropped the "to"
Which offline converter? I find myself often trying to convert:
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.
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:
imagemagick isn't really that hard, in most cases it's:
For example:
If that doesn't work, try
pdftoppm:I don't know of a good GUI for it, I recommend just learning to use either imagemagick or pdftoppm.
I downloaded it and it immediately did not work so I'm gonna have to disagree with you there, champ.
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.
This is just a fucking lie and I'm tired of hearing it. What did I just say?
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?
There's also a pretty big chance that they'll do more than what the button says, like inject malware. That's the whole point of the article.
It is indeed very difficult to type convert 001.jpg example.pdf and ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
TYPE IT WHERE!? WHAT DO I DO WITH THIS INFORMATION!? How are you so completely unaware of how non-sensical this information is?
The terminal? Your post history suggests you are quite familiar with Linux. But I agree that those who are most prone to use random file conversion sites because they need something as PDF for work will be very confused by those instructions.
I am familiar with Linux but I avoid it whenever possible. I dailyed it for a couple of years but I've unfortunately moved on to Mac due to their deep dependency on terminal. If I have a problem and go and look up support, 99% of the time the advice is to open the terminal and start running commands, which is almost never the case for Windows or Mac. I've been using a Mac for about a year and I don't even know where the terminal is. Even where there's a perfectly suitable GUI solution, they'll send you into the terminal anyway. Linux is made by and for devs and it is and will remain that way until the mentality of it's creators change. And I am not a dev.
I can follow instructions. The problem is #1 I'm told "don't type commands you don't understand" and #2 no one ever explains what any of these commands do, so I never learn anything, and #3 the commands don't work, and they return a generic error with zero diagnostic information, or sometimes just nothing at all happens. I don't have time for that. I just want something that works.
imagemagick handles almost all image files
ffmpeg handles almost all video files
if 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)
then 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.
Don't most pdf viewers have an export to image option?
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?
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.
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.