In our testing, in the latest version of Chrome, there is about a 75-80% performance hit. So a 6-hour native encoding would take a little over a day to compile (we're working on getting more accurate benchmarks)

You're right, you're not going to use this to encode movies or very large media files, but for encoding shorter clips, the performance isn't unreasonable.

Perhaps if you have something that can intelligently split the job into segments and communicate with other nodes over webRTC then you could have a distributed encoder that any spare machine with a browser can join.

> Some things are just better left to the desktop and not the web

That list changes every year, too. As JS runtimes get faster, more and more is now possible in the browser that would've been fully impractical just a few years ago. In just a few more years, I predict that stuff like video processing won't be so far-fetched either.

http://www.easyprintscreen.com saves me time firing up photoshop.

(shameless plug) more editing tools coming soon :)

Funnily enough I'm using a color pallete plugin written by @bgrins who is working on the OP project.

Porting software to multiple platforms can be a pain, and a source of bugs. If there's an update it has to manually installed by each person. Then you have to remember where you put it, or which one is in your $PATH. And if you want to send it to someone else, you have to find the right version for their machine and figure out where they can download it, or how to copy it over to them. <- These problems are all solved by having a single URL you can visit or share, where the latest version of the single codebase runs every time.

Honestly, I think this project was to show what could be done all inside the browser. This is a very cool idea, and is extremely impressive for being done in a weekend. Don't be that guy--maybe you should find some passion.