I wrote a new tool in Rust to convert M4A’s to MP3’s | Hacker News Reader

I wrote a new tool in Rust to convert M4A’s to MP3’s

johnward.net

13 pointsWardyJP17 comments

I know rust is trending, but this is becoming somewhat silly. This is a command line argument wrapper for ffmpeg...

Not to mention that when you know that, the title becomes highly misleading. There is absolutely not a single line of rust code that does anything that the title suggests.

This is a useful project example as a hello world for how to handle program arguments, and maybe also as an example use of ffmpeg.

But, neither are binary conversion of audio formats. That is ffmpeg doing the heavy lifting.

This is probably the lowest quality submission I've seen on HN for a long time.

Maybe all the Rust acolytes should take a breather, we get it, you love Rust and think it's the newest of new hotnesses.

before the inevitable 'this is a oneliner in bash', the oneliner is actually in the code already:

https://github.com/johnward/fmtconverter/blob/a83b6cb5b4fcd5...

so take it for what it is - learning/showcase of rust filesystem and process spawn apis.

Shell 1-liner is a pragmatic approach, but for a submission with "in Rust" in the title I hoped it would be something fancier.

For example, it's possible to use ffmpeg's C API to do the transcoding in process:

https://github.com/zmwangx/rust-ffmpeg/blob/master/examples/...

absolutely no disagreement here

(With ffmpeg as a dependency.)

It makes me happy to see that bigbubba seemingly registered an account just to save me from reading this article. Thank you, now less-anonymous person. Welcome.

Ah, it shells out to ffmpeg. I was hoping it would handle the conversion itself, just for technical reading. It should still be a good model for any similar task, though.

Possible alternate title: "My very first blog post about my very first Rust program."

No mention that ffmpeg is required, which seems like a glaring omission.

This is a just a Sedo.com parked domain page for me...

This link goes to a domain parking page for me

the link is non-https, your ISP might be MITMing you

It's a parked page for me too. I tried via my residential ISP and my cellular provider. Granted that's ATT and Verizon respectively, so I wouldn't be surprised in either case.

Edit: MITMing confirmed. I was able to load the site through a VPN.

I figured it out, the apex goes to parking page, the WWW goes to the actual blog.

this is easily done without ffmpeg. but it is rust after all so it must be a really good and fast and cool wrapper :D

> this is easily done without ffmpeg

That's a premise for an article I'd like to read.

I work with Go and there is plenty of libraries that can extract a audio track from mp4 container and wrap it into mp3 container. I doubt the situation is any different with any other language. You can also write it yourself from scratch. It's not that hard to read the specs and make a working library in a day or two. I know this because I was recently looking into live video streaming so I learnt quite a bit about codecs, containers, protocols and so on.

Though, obviusly, I am not talking about transcoding one codec to another.

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