This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
“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.
Yes this can also happen. I should have written open source offline converter
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:
ffmpeg -i input_video.mp4 output_video.avi
imagemagick isn't really that hard, in most cases it's:
convert <file1> <file2>
For example:
convert file.pdf file.jpg
If that doesn't work, try pdftoppm:
pdftoppm input.pdf outputname -png
I 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.
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.
imagemagick handles almost all image files
images ) ls
001.jpg 002.jpg 003.jpg 004.jpg 005.jpg
images ) convert 001.jpg example.pdf
ffmpeg handles almost all video files
ex ) ls
rock.mp4
ex ) ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi
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)
/#!/usr/bin/env fish
set file $argv[1]
convert $file (basename $file .png).pdf
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.
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.
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
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.
“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.
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!
No way, lol