this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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[–] MemmingenFan923@feddit.org 82 points 2 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 47 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 10 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] horrorslice@lemmy.zip 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

The website mentions that there are fake offline converters that push malware as well.

[–] MemmingenFan923@feddit.org 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes this can also happen. I should have written open source offline converter

[–] amphy@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What you recommend in terms of offline open-source converters?

[–] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Pandoc for documents, ffmpeg for video , imagemagick for images

[–] prayer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What image types are you using that ffmpeg can't convert? To my knowledge it works for almost anything.

[–] dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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:)

[–] prayer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Images from PDFs, wasn't thinking about that. I normally work with just image files. Cool!

[–] AppearanceBoring9229@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] quid_pro_joe 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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"

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Which offline converter? I find myself often trying to convert:

  • PDF to JPEG
  • AVC to MP4
  • OPUS to MP3

etc. I have no idea how to do that but if I type it into a search engine there's usually tools there.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

FFmpeg and handbrake do the latter two quite handily. The latter even has a nice program interface, rather than needing commands.

ImageMagick is capable of the first. I've had it go the other way before, and I should be most surprised if it couldn't convert a PDF to a jpg.

[–] kava@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

imagemagick handles almost all image files

images ) ls
001.jpg  002.jpg  003.jpg  004.jpg  005.jpg
images ) convert 001.jpg example.pdf

ffmpeg handles almost all video files

ex ) ls
rock.mp4
ex ) ffmpeg -i rock.mp4 rock.avi

if you use gnome there's a nice little feature of the file explorer where you can just drag and drop scripts into ~/.local/share/nautilus/scripts/

for example

make a fish script (ignoring error checking for brevity here, my real script had a couple guard rails)

/#!/usr/bin/env fish
set file $argv[1]
convert $file (basename $file .png).pdf

then when you right click on a file in your gnome file explorer you can click the scripts option

example

and the script is right there so you can just easily convert with the press of a button

example

note, i crossed out some stuff that includes client names

tldr: there are so many ways to do what you need to do there's no reason to trust random websites you don't know. there's a lot of slimey people out there wanting to take advantage of people. and everybody should strive to be at least a little computer literate. the examples i gave here aren't complicated. they're simple commands

[–] vithigar@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

PDF to JPEG

Don't most pdf viewers have an export to image option?

AVC to MP4

Do you actually have files with an .avc extension? AVC is a codec that can be used in many different container formats, including MP4. Where did these files come from?

OPUS to MP3

I actually agree that most audio conversion tools are needlessly awkward. Audacity will convert these just fine, though doesn't really do bulk conversion. Foobar2000 will do it in bulk if you're on windows.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

Don't most pdf viewers have an export to image option?

Don't know, I never looked! But I will, thanks.

Do you actually have files with an .avc extension?

Yes

Audacity will convert these just fine, though doesn't really do bulk conversion.

I'll give this a try on Tenacity. I didn't realize they had file conversion on there.

Only helpful comment in this thread, thanks.

On the PDF to JPEG, you can also open the PDFs with an image editor, such as Inkscape or krita, and then save the image on the format and quality needed. This method also has the benefit that on some cases you play with the assets if needed. (Depends on how was the PDF generated)

[–] zerofk@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I can’t comment on the others, but PDF to JPEG should be easy enough. ImageMagick, which another commenter suggested, is possible but not user friendly. However you can just open the PDF in many applications and export it as an image. Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop can do it. GIMP probably too.

I’m a last ditch effort you can even just open the file and screenshot it.

[–] shottymcb@lemm.ee 2 points 2 months ago

Open/Libreoffice can do that too

[–] kipo@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You could try Permute. It's a pretty simple app for converting video and audio. Permute is my go-to for quick video conversion.

DBPowerAmp has an easy-to-use audio converter that supports pretty much every audio format and does batch file conversion as well. DBPowerAmp is my go-to for audio conversion.

Both of these are paid apps.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks, I'll check those out.

[–] ploot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

In Windows, Foobar2000 does easy audio file conversions, once you have installed the relevant codecs.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Video and audio conversion can be done with Handbrake or Shutter Encoder, both are nice GUIs

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 1 points 2 months ago

Handbrake won't load the file and Shutter won't even open. But thank you.

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.