this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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That's why I always prefer an offline converter. Also if your upload a file somewhere the website can save it for their own purpose alhough they say they won't do it.
Precisely, and this is why I've never trusted online "free" converters since day one. Who the fuck knows what they're actually doing with your file, and I always assumed that most of them were fronts to steal data and IP from users who are stupid enough to upload corporate and business stuff to them.
Anyway, there's vanishingly little I haven't been able to do over the years with ffmpeg or Imagemagick, their byzantine command line structures notwithstanding.
Which is why I've been happy to trust them for files nobody cares about, like a random audio file that I got off the Internet. And it's very unlikely they'd be able to exploit my media player.
The website mentions that there are fake offline converters that push malware as well.
Yes this can also happen. I should have written open source offline converter
What you recommend in terms of offline open-source converters?
Pandoc for documents, ffmpeg for video , imagemagick for images
What image types are you using that ffmpeg can't convert? To my knowledge it works for almost anything.
Gonna be honest, never used ffmpeg for images lol. I often take images from PDFs that have transparency (rpg books to import into my vtt) and they come out of pdfimages with an opaque greyscale alpha mask and an opaque image. I found it easy to apply the mask with imagemagick, though. Ffmpeg can probably do it but just never had a use case. I just use cwebp to convert because that's my primary use-case: converting pngs to lossy webp files and cwebp is good enough for me for that:)
Images from PDFs, wasn't thinking about that. I normally work with just image files. Cool!
What are you looking to convert?
Usually what i do is look for any converter and look for open source alternatives to it on alternativeto.net and hopefully one of the top 3 alternatives fits your use case
Psst the URL is: https://alternativeto.net/ I always stop here first to research what software options there are available and also learning what other people are using. Extremely useful and trustworthy site!
Thanks i dropped the "to"
I tend to just whip up a script of some sort that employs widely used libraries for the conversion. I know that’s more technical than most people would have the tolerance or aptitude for, but for me, it’s the least ambiguous and most secure way to do stuff like that. And then I can squirrel it away in a utility scripts directory and use it later if I need it again.