If I had a nickel for every time someone has whined that you need to self host this, I’d have 2 nickels. Which isn’t a lot but still noteworthy because this is literally a self-host community.
It's nice there's a front end for all these tools but I kinda don't get why is everything "hosted". This could have just been a desktop app. I guess it can be useful when you want to convert something on your phone but to me it just seems like unnecessary server maintenance burden.
Install it once, use it on any of your devices. Run it once on a capable server so even potatoes get the advantage of it. Run it once so it only needs to support one OS and hardware architecture.
Using an app of some description over many different device types is far more of a maintenance headache and that's before you start dealing with app stores.
I think that a good chunk of the selfhosted community is "sole IT guy at a tiny company". This is great for that, since having to update desktop software in twenty places sucks.
Yeah, having played one of the many roles like this a few years back (pre-covid), I wish tools like these had more presence. Would've made my life infinitely easier.
Something like this is useful as well if you have a large item to convert since you can offload that processing to your server/NAS and not have it bog down your PC/phone/etc
Fair enough. I guess I imagined someone hosting all the selfhosted web apps that get posted to this forum, when most people likely just host only the few they need on the go, so it isn't really that burdensome.
Edit: Forgot to add: I always though that it could be useful to just set up Apache Guacamole, so that instead of the hosted services, my family members could just use remote desktop apps but I never got around to it.
It's not like your uploading and downloading gigabytes to it to use ffmpeg. For that you use something local. This is for converting smaller files conveniently. For example from a laptop and you don't want to use a public converter that might keep the content.
If you regularly convert certain file types on a computer, dedicated programs tend to be better than these combo ones anyway.