this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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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.
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:
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 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
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.
Thanks, I'll check those out.
Video and audio conversion can be done with Handbrake or Shutter Encoder, both are nice GUIs
Handbrake won't load the file and Shutter won't even open. But thank you.
In Windows, Foobar2000 does easy audio file conversions, once you have installed the relevant codecs.