I'm making a FOSS all-in-one file converter app - looking for opinions!

Hey, I'm clearly not in the target audience, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.

I think your motivation is great, I absolutely loathe these websites you mention and, if my mother was prone to doing these operations on her machine, I'd worry quite a bit.

By virtue of that alone, I believe this is a worthwhile endeavour and you should keep at it.

But to answer more specifically your points.

1. I don't know about the state of other GUI tools. Maybe the problem has more to do with exposure than lack of choice? I don't think more choice is necessarily bad, the real issue is managing to put it in front of the people you're targeting.
2. That goes to my second point. I could subjectively give you my opinion on it, but it would be better to have it tested by someone who fits the bill of intended user. I don't know how many of these people you'll find on Lemmy tbh.

Personally I... am not a fan of the interface but, I am a grumpy middle aged person who started on computers way too young on an Atari running Atari TOS... So my idea of a good GUI would probably send horror shivers down a lot of people's spines. There are objectively good points to yours: it looks snappy, reactive, there are not a lot of buttons or options so as not to overwhelm, and an easy and clear way to open the file explorer. Looks like a great proof of concept that you can keep polishing and iterating on as you go.

Good luck with it!

I like the idea a lot, I don't know how to use CLI well and I dislike those websites. I would suggest for the UI to use standard graphics libraries like GTK, or Windows and Mac default theming to make it consistent with other OS apps and themeable by the user, if you can do that

Looks simple enough. The choice of Godot for a UI library is an interesting one; how big is the program in the end?

I would suggest being a bit more explicit about files: Which ones are in the working set; which one is currently being worked on, that sort of thing. Having a file list (even if it's hidden in a drawer or something) before starting the conversion helps the user verify that the correct files are being worked on. Seeing which file is currently being processed might be useful for troubleshooting or just to see how far along the process is.

Would be really awesome if it could convert between .doc(x), .odt and .pdf .

I love you. That's my opinion.

As for actual feedback, when saving/converting images I always require a preview or I'm just not going to use it; I find great satisfaction in carefully trial-and-erroring my way into the nicest image quality with the lowest file size.

if you are looking to expand this, I think a fronted to pandoc to convert between text document types is also very needed.

I like it so far! Looks like it would be easier to use for a good amount of people, and better than going to those sites each time.

I recently came across https://vert.sh/ which is a we app and frontend for ffmpeg and imagemagick but all the processing is happening locally on your device (except videos I think).

It's even open source: https://github.com/VERT-sh/VERT

I like the look of this!

My only suggestion would be to change the word delete to remove. Unless of course its function is in fact to delete the file from the HDD, but I assume it means to remove the file from the conversion process.

oh, i am VERY interested in this!

seems like it'd be a very handy tool for modding, since file conversions are usually either done through gimp, if it supports the format, or some random ass tool/website that does only one thing...

having a swiss army knife type solution would be excellent!

one point of feedback about the interface:

anytime there's a slider, there should also be a direct input field to type into.

this is to prevent things like UI scaling, or mouse sensitivity preventing proper input...ask me how i know...

might also be an accessibility thing; for example people with tremors, or generally low dexterity.

text input is never the wrong choice, but sliders can be!

One of the tasks I find myself wanting to do all the time is clip my own gifs without having to use a whole dedicated app or busting out a video editor. I know it’s a lot more complex, but a system for doing basic video clipping would be amazing. I could be way off base, but I would think since you’re already using ffmpeg, maybe this isn’t too far of a stretch, but I understand if this is way beyond scope.

I want to convert a pdf into kilometres thanks

Godot? Wtf?

Also,

I’ve looked around, and I found all the local GUI converters like Handbrake are unwieldy to use, especially if you just want to convert in bulk.

Idk Handbrake specifically, but generally when that kind of thing happens it's for a good reason. There are a lot of options when converting a video file, and you can't support them all without exposing that complexity in some form. If you don't think so, then you haven't done enough research into the problem space.

With that said, a "dumbed down" version of Handbrake that is optimized for a single common use case could be useful. For example, re-encoding iPhone videos to minimize compression artifacts when sharing over Whatsapp could be useful to people. However, I don't think a desktop app is the most accessible implementation for that.

EDIT: also, even if a desktop app was a good choice, it might be more practical to implement it as like a preset for Handbrake rather than a whole separate app. My mom isn't very tech literate, but I could probably teach her how to activate a preset (idk if Handbrake supports presets, but it probably does lol)

For some reason I can't connect to the server where the demonstration is stored so I can't comment on the UI, but I can say that I would be interested in that, as I don't feel comfortable using websites like those. I would 100% use an app like this, especially if it were available as a flatpak.

Do you plan to keep it to image/audio conversions, or do you think the app may eventually support other formats (e.g. document formats)?

I'd love this, I think the biggest obstacle is beating the online converter sites on friction of use, but the automatic file type detection feels like a really good way to combat that

I would also say no your project is very welcome and love that you can do photos and videos at once!! Highly looking forward to it being released in future!!

1. As another suggestion aside from my other comment it would be cool if we can set individually what each individual photo/video will convert too. Can be for future reworked version of this project. That would help a ton for batch work.

2. Also, setup a Liberapay to get the most out of donations. Have the link in your app too somewhere so people can donate/see how much you make/how much more you need with a bar saying how much more is needed.

3. A queue feature to queue multiple photos and videos to be converted then add more to the active queue whenever

4. A customizeable template feature would be cool too for people who work with specific files a lot. For example setting it to auto convert PNG to JPG, or MP4 TO MP3, etc.

I don't know if this can help for inspiration, but I use this tool for file conversion: Convertx It doesn't have a bulk mode.

1. I think it would be better called a media file converter or something more specific like that, unless you actually intend on adding more types of file, like doc, odf, md, pdf etc.
2. Interesting. I also made a little thingy for personal use, though it does literally call the ffmpeg CLI tool. Haven't even made an install configuration though, so you will just have to run it out of the build directory.