I feel like most of the FBI warnings these days are "by the way the stove is hot don't touch it".
They said something very similar about free VPN services
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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“Users who in the past would type ‘free online file converter’ into a search engine are vulnerable, as the algorithms used for results now often include paid results, which might be scams.”
Nooo, you mean turning search engines into monetization and ad delivery engines had downsides? Who would have thought!
Fucking greed at the root of another goddamned issue...
That's why I only use totallylegitfileconverter.ru they even have a lottery where they can directly transfer the money to your bank account when you win. They're very friendly!
Protip: ask your favourite llm to write you a python script to convert between the formats you're interested in. Bonus benefit: simultaneously learn a bit about programming!
As much as I'm not a fan of this, I'll at least admit it was helpful in helping me quickly learn how to scale videos using FFMPEG. That, combined with the documentation and now I have a command saved to a reference text document to help if I ever forget.
Ffmprg is remarkably powerful. If it is a picture on your screen, you can use ffmpeg to do what you want to it. Recently discovered it could convert PNG, jpeg, and webp images back and forth. To think I've only used it for video.
I have zero interest in learning all the intricacies of ffmpeg so I find ChatGPT to be very useful. I’ve also used it for yt-dlp for downloading videos and converting the audio to mp3. Very useful. I personally save them as bash scripts so I can just input the file name or url as a command line argument. On Mac you can also wrap your bash scripts in AppleScript if you want to make applets for these functions. ChatGPT works great for apple script as well but I’ve had to feed it source code (eg from Apple Digital Mastering applets) to ensure it writes the new code correctly. You still must know what you’re doing.
Is yt-dlp really that difficult that you can't take ten min to learn the syntax? Do you not worry that you might end up relying on this stuff too much?
For example, I know I'm completely reliant on GPS, and I would be useless without it
The syntax is easy, but the options change a bit depending on what you want to do. My entire job I requires me to use my brain so I don’t mind cheating when it doesn’t really matter as in this case. In my case I wanted a SQLite database to store URLs and playlist IDs for recording attempts and to make sure I don’t download the same video multiple times. I think I also had songs run thru music brainz for audio fingerprinting and mp3 tags. ChatGPT doesn’t get it right the first time but often gives a reasonable boilerplate piece of code as a template to start from.
I'd recommend some CLI utility to a beginner over Python: pandoc, ffmpeg, image magic...
True, that's a good point :)
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!
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“Users who in the past would type ‘free online file converter’ into a search engine are vulnerable, as the algorithms used for results now often include paid results, which might be scams.”
Mm hmm.
I refuse to believe that the free service I've been using for years has been exploiting my behavior for money.. what kind of world is this?? What kind of psychopathic organization would do such a thing? Why isn't capitalism working for me? Why?
The best is online CSR generators.
Yes, I know people who have implemented private keys they have been given from random websites.
No way, lol
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