This is the real reason I do so much DIY. I don’t save a lot of money, at least on the initial outlay, but I learn.

Ah, I’ll put in a zoom feature, that’s a good idea!

Remind me of the hardware you’re running on? 22 hours for a 4k HDR movie sounds about in the ballpark for converting on CPU. I’ve just switched to Linux (Mint, not Cachy) and I think there’s an issue with detecting GPU on Linux, so this’d track (or you have Precision Mode enabled) - if you see “libx265” or “libx264” in the top right, you’re on CPU. I’m looking into this one.

Can I ask which version you downloaded? I’ll look into the DVTools/MP4box issue.

Also, yes, I removed the codec and container selection boxes - it’s HEVC/MKV by default unless you go for “Compatibility Mode” in which case you get H.264/MP4. “Preserve AV1” of course preserves AV1 which is incompatible with MP4 so they’re mutually exclusive.

So… How’s it working? 😅 (Just realised it’s been a while since I’ve touched HISTV and this came to mind, I’ve been working on my business and day job)

LLMs will never be people

Boy oh boy, you’re not gonna like this one bit: https://www.npr.org/2014/07/28/335288388/when-did-companies-become-people-excavating-the-legal-evolution

(To be clear, I understand you think you covered this with “computers may be” but my point is different: the law is often dumb and you would be amazed at what politicians who don’t understand tech - or get paid not to understand it - will pull off)

Edit: Downvotes from people who missed the point. You can’t say “LLMs will never be people” because you simply can’t guarantee your/our lawmakers won’t be that stupid.

I watched Quantum Leap with my dad when I was a kid. You’re gonna try and tell me I’m not writing this reply on Ziggy?

Ah, what version did you try? This is due to issues with the renderer, but I just got this fixed by disabling GPU drawing for the form last night. Give 2.5.9 a go 😊

When Reddit started, Spez and Aaron made “sock puppet” accounts to make the site seem more active than it was, because you have to have what looks like an active user base to attract more users.

Now, after Reddit has gone public, they need the appearance of lots of users to attract advertising dollars and keep their stock price high, and there’s no need to operate sock puppets by hand anymore because of LLMs - they can be the sock puppets, and if you have enough of them acting human enough, it doesn’t even matter if some people realise or if one gets called out as a bot.

This also has the extremely useful benefit of steering society slowly towards the ideology of the billionaire, by having those bots normalise hate in the tsunami if messages they post.

I think the account you interacted with was an LLM, not even a real troll.

From Software patched the original Dark Souls PC port to remove Games For Windows Live when that service shut down, replaced it with steam networking. This was years and years before the remaster, so they weren’t making money on it - they just up and fixed it. MMOs? A bunch of unpaid modders brought up the first WoW custom servers, and some of those were reverse engineered.

Your argument doesn’t pass the “just look and see if it’s true” test.

Hey, I haven’t made a full post about this yet, but I thought you’d like to know: v2.5.0 is out, and it implements quietvoid’s tools for DoVi support! https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal/releases

It’ll even handle DV 5 and 7 😊

Sweet as, lmk if you have any questions or run into any issues! 😊

This is how I know I’m old. I consider the “Reddit API debacle” recent history.

Whether it’s an alternative depends on what you use Handbrake for. HISTV can’t convert ISO or rip discs, it only converts video files. If you just use Handbrake to get smaller videos, HISTV will work for you without having to use more controls than it would take to launch the space shuttle 😅

It’s great for sending money abroad. No bank, minimal fees. I use it for that all the time, to send friends gifts for weddings and birthdays and stuff.

Yes, this requires everyone in the transaction to be on the network and know how to sell cryptocurrency; the question is whether it’s useful, not whether it’s useful with no caveats 😋

Haha thanks! You mean, support them for output, as well as being able to convert from? Last night I outlined adding an “Auto” option for container, which would keep the source container if possible, but the controls I’ve exposed vs the ones I haven’t are a conscious choice, to maximise player compatibility for the outputs without the user having to know anything about codecs, containers, encoders, their hardware, or quality settings. I’m deliberately keeping the options to a minimum because I didn’t want to make Handbrake 😅

As to why I chose these codecs: h264 works on devices from 15+ years ago, and HEVC is compatible back to 2015-16. AV1 is 2020 onwards and requires GPU decoding; that’s too new and resource-intensive for my goals with HISTV.

I’ll think about how I could pull this off though. Perhaps a “lite” mode that keeps the original codec and container, or an “auto” mode for codec dropdown too. I think I like the second one better: lets you mix and match keeping container or codec or both, without adding any real complexity to the options.

Hahaha baby steps! But I’ll look at it; if nothing else I think it would be very funny to have the dev equivalent of Jar Jar Binks end the format war by accident (which I say as just a joke; I of course have no idea how complex the issue actually is).

Edit: Damn dude, you weren’t kidding about the challenge. You’re right that HISTV won’t work for DoVi 5 in its current state - “Fundamental to FFMPEG” does kinda mean “fundamental to HISTV”, being that it’s basically just a clever wrapper around FFMPEG. That said, if your tooling is ready, I’ve got a plan to integrate it. The philosophy with HISTV is to preserve whatever we can and fall back gracefully as far as we have to if we can’t preserve the current profile, which your tools slot into like they were made for it (Rust Gang represent (👉ﾟヮﾟ)👉).

Ah, then the real slowness is going to come from having them on a spinning disk HDD. For friends, 3Mbps or 4Mbps target bitrate should be plenty, with the 2x multiplier should be enough to preserve detail. No need to touch anything else, you don’t need precision mode for it. Maybe start with 3 and that on just one episode, and see how you go - if you find yourself noticing it looks blocky, bump up to 4Mbps and you’ll be golden.

Fun fact - HISTV actually has two-pass encoding! Though, with enough system RAM you can actually look ahead far enough that you can get the benefits of two-pass in just a single pass. I have a bit about this in the README.md:

Precision mode

One checkbox for the best quality the app can produce. It picks the smartest encoding strategy based on how much RAM your system has:

Your RAM	What it does
16GB or more	Looks 250 frames ahead to plan bitrate (single pass)
8-16GB	Looks 120 frames ahead to plan bitrate (single pass)
Under 8GB	Scans the whole file first, then encodes (two passes)

Two-pass only happens when precision mode is on AND the system has less than 8GB RAM AND the file would be CRF-encoded. Reason being those lookaheads above. Lookahead buffers live in memory. On low-RAM systems that buffer would be too large, so the app falls back to two-pass instead and stores the analysis run in a tempfile on disk. To break down each one:

• Pass 1: Runs ffmpeg with -pass 1 writing to a null output. ffmpeg analyses the entire file and writes a statistics log (the passlog file) describing the complexity of every scene. No actual video is produced - this pass is pure analysis.
• Pass 2: Runs ffmpeg with -pass 2 using the statistics from pass 1. The encoder now knows what’s coming and can distribute bits intelligently across the whole file - spending more on complex scenes, less on simple ones - without needing a large lookahead buffer in RAM. After both passes complete, the passlog temp files are cleaned up.

The biggest problem with two-pass encoding is the speed. It has to do two passes over the whole file: one analysis, one actually encoding. With a 250-frame lookahead, you’re basically just writing your passlog into RAM - and reading from it - as you go. With 120-frame lookahead your CPU will likely catch up to the passlog at times, but you can still write to and read from it as you go, so you still get similar speed, and still close enough in quality that it doesn’t really make a difference, in a single pass.

You know what? I think I can figure out a way to estimate final file size and display it to the user. It’ll only work if “Precision Mode” is off though - that uses “CRF” or “Constant Rate Factor” which basically tells the encoder “be efficient, but make the file as big as it needs to be to look good”. As a result there’s no way to tell how big the file will end up being - the encoder makes the decision on the fly.

With “Precision Mode” off, HISTV has two gears:

1. If your file is already small enough (at or below the target bitrate), it uses “CQP” or “Constant Quantisation Parameter” (the QP I/P numbers), which tells the encoder “Use this quality level for every frame, I don’t care how big the file ends up”. It’s fast and consistent - every frame gets the same treatment.
2. If your file is too big, it switches to VBR (Variable Bit Rate), which tells the encoder “Stay around this target bitrate, spike up to the peak ceiling on complex scenes, but don’t go over”. It’s how the app actually shrinks files. You can estimate the output size with target mbps * seconds / 8 - so a 60-second clip at 4Mbps lands around 30MB. <- This is the maths I’m thinking about doing to display the estimate to the user.

Sweet as mate, cheers for the kind words! I hope it’s useful - and if you run into any issues, or think of a feature you’d like to see, please do let me know. Bugs get fixed ASAP, and I always promise I’ll at least consider new features because I’m having a lot of fun working on this thing! 😁

Yeah, it’s early and I was just skimming the docs for it as I don’t have a Mac. I’ll think about the metadata downloader; it does have a place, arguably, as related to the mkv tag repair I built in.

As to the CLI, HISTV does have one! It’s a standalone binary but it uses the same Rust backend as the GUI for feature parity and maintainability 😊