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Comment by virtualritz | Hacker News Reader

How is this different from image/graphics magick, ffmpeg, oiiotool etc?

Or: what am I missing here, why is this on the front page?

As far as I can tell, what you're missing is the massive ease-of-use and approachability, especially for non-technical users, of a web-based graphical "convert X to Y" interface vs. facing command line ffmpeg, which they probably haven't heard of.

There are already GUIs for ffmeg and most image editing applications can save in multiple formats so its still not clear to me what this adds

It's not clear to me why that's a problem?

I feel this is easier than those solutions in a lot of cases - mainly because you don't need to install anything. Just open website, drag and drop a file, pick target format, done.

Which is only true if you are not interested in the “self-hostable” part and you installing an app is a significant difficulty.

Once an app is installed locally it is more convenient to use - that is why it is so common for apps to replicate (or just wrap) websites.

If you are not interested in the self-hostable part there are lots of online converters.

Right, but those online ones are also usually covered in ads, don't run locally, and run the risk of infecting the output with malware.

It's a web service that can be used on any device without installation. Think in terms of usability for old, non-technical folks.

All of that. A couple more thoughts. As a project it brings together energy to a task/configuration: namely that of making sure all those disparate command-line tools or bits of lib code are brought together for the specific purpose of serving file translations from some spot in a transactional fashion. So that's some value.

Why on the front page? That question might also have a non-technical answer. What's going on in news and events? Who's been setting up file translators and then "Dude I have over 4,000 soundfiles, pictures, address-books..." ... "Whoah? Like. howdy manage that one?" ... "People just submitted it. Zuck fucks"

Yeah I also cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would want a web site that converts files. Just install a desktop app to do the same (GUI or otherwise) and it will be more pleasant to use, and more performant. The Web is not a good application platform no matter how much people try to shoehorn it into being one.

People value not having to install anything, for various reasons.

Ok, but imagine you’re in a situation where you don’t have the ability to install apps, or you’re temporarily on a platform you’re unfamiliar with and so you don’t know what GUI tools exist. This is why people wind up using web-based converters, which as another commenter noted, can be hijacked for malware.

A WASM solution might not be the most performant but it will be an option.

As for the web not being a good application platform, that ship sailed 20+ years ago and at this point, it’s hard to find any “native” apps that don’t share at least some similarities or core components as web apps, even if it’s just for UI. Although I personally would rather have a good native Mac app than a mediocre web app, I’d rather have a well-written web app than a mediocre Mac Catalyst app, and in many cases, than running an iOS app on the Mac. And I often prefer a web app or app built with web technologies to “native” apps built with GTK or Qt.

yeah you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Underrated comment

For some reason even technical and linux-savvy people, (I’ve seen this on zoom calls) will google up an image or video converter. I don’t get it either, but if this provides an alternative to those awful ad-infested sites I guess it is an improvement.

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