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Show HN: I completed shipping my desktop app

526 points by anshrathodfr 2y ago

Hi, I'm a developer and first time i shipped the real product after observing the startups and indie hackers community for years. I had made so many useless apps [you should check my website https://ansh.life https://ansh.life], but this time I built a very useful product that has a number of super easy-to-use tools in one app for video, music, and photo files. Users can compress, convert, resize, and do so much more with easy-to-use tools. Background: I developed a frame-by-frame video cropper to upload cropped landscape videos to Instagram Reels. However, it required FFmpeg, and as a noob video editor, I decided to incorporate more user-friendly video tools. I then introduced image and audio tools to maximize the capabilities of FFmpeg. I use my app daily, and it has surprisingly generated a few thousand dollars for me.

nhggfu 2y ago
great work OP, and really nice website and testimonials. good hunting!
Carrok 2y ago
Congrats! I would work on your demo gifs a bit. The audio wave form one is very frustrating to watch. You select every available option, slowly, and then _finally_ click generate and show about 0.5s of the finished product before the gif loops. It could start with a 5s example of the finished product and _then_ show you all the various options.
sadeshmukh 2y ago
What software do you use for generating those demos of how the software works? Or did you edit them yourself?
- contrarian1234 2y ago
  The default video editor that comes on my vivo phone seems to have more features than this..
  - sadeshmukh 2y ago
    I mean, you don't exactly record it on your phone either.
- JusticeJuice 2y ago
  I have a hunch it's screen.studio on mac
  - sadeshmukh 2y ago
    Thanks! Looks about what I was thinking
h00dinberry 2y ago
What does this do that other similar tools don't? There are millions of video editing apps out there. What's your moat?
- jjallen 2y ago
  What’s the moat of the millions of others? 99.9% of business don’t and can’t have a moat.
  - fuzztester 2y ago
    Yep. You only need a moat if you have a fort.
- OccamsMirror 2y ago
  Did the OP pitch you for VC? Why do they need a moat?
  - somenameforme 2y ago
    I read the GP's post as sarcastic. But Poe's Law makes sarcasm hard.
  - h00dinberry 2y ago
    Why should one pay for an app containing features one could get for free somewhere else? A google search for "free video editing software" gets 650M hits... Just to be clear, this isn't a criticism of the software on technical grounds. I don't doubt that the OP knows what he's doing. It's the commercial aspect of it that I don't understand.
- debarshri 2y ago
  The moat is, it was built by a single dev with capital efficiency. This is what millions of other video editing apps backed by VCs lack. On top of that the app has organic views as it ended up on top of hacker news that lot of these apps haven't.
qntmfred 2y ago
© 2024
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  done
sirjaz 2y ago
Great job, love seeing new desktop apps!!
sgallant 2y ago
Very well done!
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Thank you so much!
gbertb 2y ago
dope! did you use tauri or electron?
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  i used Flutter to build an entire app. thank you!
distantsounds 2y ago
[flagged]
- aussieguy1234 2y ago
  I'm aware of a person who started a "startup" and made a revolutionary new way to resize and manipulate images server side. The whole thing was a simple PHP script invoking imagemagick. They made it available over an API. Sold it to eBay for more than $1M.
  - endofreach 2y ago
    "Congrats to being a slave to the capitalist system"
- kilohotel 2y ago
  This kind of reply is tiresome. Every piece of software is providing an abstraction for libraries. Unless you're sitting there pushing raw machine code, you're just being an annoying hypocrite.
- mandevil 2y ago
  Building a good UI is not to be sneezed at- it's a lot of very important work to get a user experience that isn't a dreadful series of checkboxes with limited choice. I haven't downloaded this so I can't tell if he has succeeded, but charging for a good user experience on top of a open-source library is a pretty classic thing.
- endofreach 2y ago
  > congrats on wrapping ffmpeg and charging for it! I doubt that people who are capable of using ffmpeg are the target group here.
- raincole 2y ago
  "dropbox is just rsync with a bit of cute UI"
- kaonwarb 2y ago
deepfriedbits 2y ago
Congrats! The app (and the website) look really polished.
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Thank you!
hedgehog0 2y ago
Congrats OP and it looks really nice! Out of curiosity, may I ask what’s ur tech stack for developing this software? I’m also an aspiring app developer :) Thank you!
- avtar 2y ago
  Looks like it's "Flutter, sqlite, nextjs" https://ansh.life/projects/pimosa https://ansh.life/projects/pimosa
  - anshrathodfr 2y ago
    yes it is built using flutter!
    - firemelt 2y ago
      nextjs for what?
contrarian1234 2y ago
"Download Now" does not in fact download now
kilohotel 2y ago
Excited to play with this! Noticed early on you ask for device password. I understand why you are doing it but this is still pretty sus, any other way to install the libraries as needed w/o pw?
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Nothing to be sus about. I use this script to install the libraries that I made open source. https://github.com/Ansh-Rathod/pimosa-builds/blob/main/maclibsinstall.sh https://github.com/Ansh-Rathod/pimosa-builds/blob/main/macli...
  - klabetron 2y ago
    Might want to add major version checks particularly with ffmpeg as IIRC filter syntax can vary between major versions (speaking as someone who is pretty sure he’s got an older version of ffmpeg installed because I don’t want to rewrite my scripts).
unshavedyak 2y ago
For video editing, can you put basic text/etc over the video? Ie gifs + text? A refined UX for going from screen capture to stupid gif, on Linux and Windows, would easily be something i'd pay for.
Boldened15 2y ago
Looks great, beautiful landing page and it looks like a labor of love! - Most of the page titles are the (same)[1] which doesn't seem good for SEO. Each of the pages like "Pricing" or "Compress Your Video Files" should be differently named. - The "video compressor" tool would be much more useful if you could enter a target file size. This is a frequent use case, if you want to send a video over email or social media apps like Messenger with a file size limit. The only way I've been able to do that for myself is basically encode it repeatedly with ffmpeg at various quality settings until the file size is just small enough, but you could probably automate that with something more intelligent like a good guess and a binary search. I'm sure someone's made a library to do that already though. - It needs a whole bunch of features related to subtitles, like making a subtitled GIF from a video file with subtitles. - Maybe risky to include copyrighted work like the Spider-Verse movie in the demo video? Unless you really did rip it legally from a Blu-ray. - There are random grammar mistakes and capitalization issues throughout the site, nothing major but worth a pass by a native English speaker. "What kinda files Pimosa supports?" and "Every files gets processed on your device only" as some examples. Might give some people pause. - Could be worth to have a more prominent "Download" box at the top section that automatically detects your OS. Most landing pages have that so I assume it works. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpimosa.app https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpimosa....
- zwnow 2y ago
  Does SEO really matter still? I have seen a few videos that show how the SEO algorithm works a few months ago, at least googles, and you basically can't optimize in that regard.
  - JoeOfTexas 2y ago
    For search engines, not so much. But it helps for linking to pages on social media.
  - shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
    The app developer showing his desktop app here is also a part of SEO, so it always matters.
senkora 2y ago
Small nitpick: on your user testimonials, you list reddit users as r/<username> when the correct way to do it is u/<username>.
- latexr 2y ago
  > Small nitpick Nitpick on your nitpick: By definition, all nitpicks are small. This isn’t important, but I thought you might appreciate the meta commentary.
  - MichaelApproved 2y ago
    Nitpick on your nitpick: It’s possible for something to be small, relative to something that is already considered small. Things that are considered small can still have variations in the extent of their smallness.
  - krsdcbl 2y ago
    nitpick on your nitpick on the nitpick: a "metacommentary" would be if you'd be commenting on your own text. That's even less important, but I thought you might appreciate such asides
    - j_bum 2y ago
      Wouldn’t it be meta commentary if we’re discussing the nature of the comments, regardless of who made them? If not, what type of commentary would it be?
    - vendiddy 2y ago
      Are there any contenders to provide a nitpick on this?
  - csallen 2y ago
    Even though saying "small nitpick" is redundant in terms of its literal meaning (denotation), communication is about more than simple denotation. It's also about emphasis, tone, and emotions, and saying "small nitpick" can be a good way to soften criticism and add a little humility and politeness.
behnamoh 2y ago
so basically a wrapper for ffmpeg and imagemagick.
- kaptainscarlet 2y ago
  which is perfectly fine because not everyone wants to do everything on the command line
batmaniam 2y ago
nice! was this built in electron?
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Built using almost native-like using flutter, not electron.
newusertoday 2y ago
how are you able to get around ffmpeg licensing since it is client app which requires you to open your code if you use ffmpeg GPL?
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  it uses homebrew to install the FFmpeg on the user's device. the app doesn't bundle any libs to comply with their license limitations.
- globalnode 2y ago
  O_o, well that was a short lived app.
  - odo1242 2y ago
    FFmpeg is LGPL, not GPL. This means that you can link it in non open source apps and only have to open source modifications to FFmpeg itself.
- levkk 2y ago
  It does not require that you do that. It only requires you to open source any modifications you've made to ffmpeg.
  - newusertoday 2y ago
    it is slightly more nuanced, if you do static linking it is considered derivative work and does requires you to open it. Since the app is based on ffmpeg which is GPL(core is LGPL) i am curious to know how it is getting used.
    - anshrathodfr 2y ago
      i didn't bundle the ffmpeg in the app. It uses homebrew to install ffmpeg on the user's device. this is the acceptable way since ffmpeg confirms it on twitter/X. https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1766649563891339510 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1766649563891339510
joshSzep 2y ago
I really wanted to click on the features as they slid by to learn more about them. I was disappointed when I couldn't.
can16358p 2y ago
Congratulations! The app and the site looks really cool. A very very small issue on website. In the FAQ section it says "Every files gets processed on your device only" I think "files" should be "file" there. Nothing really important, just my perfectionism :) Keep up the good work!
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Thank you so much! i'm currently building the new landing page and have updated all the things there.
kyrra 2y ago
May I suggest not offering lifetime updates? All software that does this ends up getting around it in the end because they realize they need to get more money from existing customers to actually stay afloat. Normally by releasing the product under a slightly different name or some other sleight of hand. The model like jetbrains does with IntelliJ I think is decent. Or look at smaller software like sublime text or ArqBackup (we're a license is forever for a specific major release of the software)
- adastra22 2y ago
  Maybe I'm old school, but I won't "buy" (rent?) subscriptions for software. I expect to own it outright, at to receive at least security updates for a reasonable time period.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > I expect to own it outright Unless you are the legal creator or buy the copyright, you never own software outright, you license it from the owner (or its public domain and has no owner.)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - layer8 2y ago
      At least in Europe, you do own the copy of the software you bought. The first-sale doctrine applies. https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-07/cp120094en.pdf https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...
  - thfuran 2y ago
    Do you expect to receive a free car every new model year after buying one outright?
    - Sanzig 2y ago
rhinoceraptor 2y ago
It looks awesome and very handy, I found a few minor UI issues, I'm trying the Windows version on a 4k monitor. * The "< Home" button when you enter video/audio/photo tools is only clickable and changes color when hovering below the text, I would suggest making that a larger blue button. This doesn't happen for the "< Back" button which is in the same area when you're in a tool * If the upper image crop handles are all the way at the top, they aren't clickable, they don't show the resize cursor. When you drag them it moves the window instead of the crop handle I have a few suggestions: * I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I think video should have a similar combined crop/flip/rotate UI instead of separate ones like for photos * It seems like batch processing is a first class notion in the app, which is definitely very handy, but I think maybe it should be a mode toggled by a radio? I think a lot of use cases are just one off uses, in which case the UI can be made a lot simpler. If I'm just working on one file, I would prefer to be dropped right into the tool editor rather than having to click edit. * 2 devices for the extended license is still a little too limited in my opinion. I would make it so authenticating the app to a computer requires access to the email that purchased it, and then make the extended license unlimited. I don't think you have to worry about that getting used for a team since it would require access to the email account.
- layer8 2y ago
  Regarding the last point, I’ve seen companies doing exactly this, making the purchase through an admin account and relating the license info to each employee that needs it. Nevertheless, I agree that two devices is too restrictive, it should be five or so.
azinman2 2y ago
The video editor seems extremely useful. Id consider making that more of a hero in describing the app. NB: “Privacy Alert: Files are uploaded to third-party servers.” Wraps oddly on my iPhone, resulting in squishing the circle.
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Yes, Thank you. I need to work on the landing page.
lovegrenoble 2y ago
I won't rent a subscription for any software
- georgeecollins 2y ago
  My understanding is it's a one time purchase, lifetime update for a single user. If you misunderstood this I am guessing because you didn't click on the "license option" buttons because it sounded like subscription software. That's a good thing for the dev to know, because I agree, this doesn't seem like something I would pay for monthly or yearly, but I might buy.
lovegrenoble 2y ago
Without Pimosa "Always searching on Google for free tools" Ok, I'm fine with it
- szundi 2y ago
  They meant searching for free tools but finding crap/malware
lovegrenoble 2y ago
I love Filmora Perpetual license: https://filmora.wondershare.com/sales-promotion.html https://filmora.wondershare.com/sales-promotion.html
- valryon 2y ago
  Too many useless AI features in the last version of Filmora, the user experience is really degraded now.
  - lovegrenoble 2y ago
    Agreed with you
nirav72 2y ago
Does the video editor allow combining clips of various resolution and aspect ratios?
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Yes, but it will export in only one consistance aspect ratio.
georg-stone 2y ago
Wow! The UI looks stunning, looks very intuitive, and seems like you've spent a lot of time on this. Great job!
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Yes! I spent lot of time on UI Thank you.
madduci 2y ago
Congratulations. Do you plan to launch a Linux version?
rib3ye 2y ago
Here is my feature request for osx: I capture many screen recordings using quicktime command+shift+5. I would like to select multiple screen recordings, right-click, and send them all to a single app to: compress, merge, save to new video or export straight to gif with preset default.
mansarip 2y ago
This is very inspiring. I quit using Flutter because the required size was too large, including cache and so on. I’m only using a 256GB Mac M1. Anyway, the UI is beautiful, you must have some design skills already.
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Damn! I built the app on the same machine. thank you so much!
yusunglee2074 2y ago
Were you originally interested in video editing, photography, and other things like that? How did you come up with the idea to create a program like this? Tell us a little more about it, please.
zerr 2y ago
Why did you choose that particular payment processor?
nazmul21 2y ago
Looks so great. Congrats on your launch.
jimmySixDOF 2y ago
If this had screen capture recording integration I would 100% buy ! I have been on handbreak for years and what you have does look like an improvement. Good luck and congratulations!
- omnimus 2y ago
  What does screen recording have to do with encoding app? Its completely different type of app (quite hard btw) with different UX requirements. Its like saying if it could do spreadsheets i would 100% buy it.
JusticeJuice 2y ago
Bonus bug report, underscores in filenames seem to mess with things. E.g. DCS_0035 and DCS_0036 both resolve to DCS_(1), overwriting each other.
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  This is a big issue and I'm pushing the fix update ASAP!
JusticeJuice 2y ago
Good job! Small bug report, when the UI is downloading the FFMPEG binaries, the UI says 'Astimed time' instead of 'Estimated time'.
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Thank you for reporting! I fixed it in the new version.
Tepix 2y ago
Looks great, congrats! Your roadmap is outdated.
omnimus 2y ago
Looks real pro! I am in middle of moving to linux but damn apps like these make me think i should keep my mac. Two common image usecases (maybe just not documented on site) that i regurarly need. - .heic input support from airdropped iphone images - JpegXL .jxl support as i am moving my image library to this format for space saving and futureproofing I assume its imagemagicks fault but maybe low hanging fruit as the library updates.
- fl0id 2y ago
  There’s some similar apps… maybe not one that combines all these though
- tobiasbischoff 2y ago
  You can just right click any HEIC File and convert it instantly to JPG from the Finder.
tzury 2y ago
Congratulations! A. The better call Saul on the video demo is cheerful. Thanks for putting a smile on my face. B. You want to convey simplicity, then do that on the copy. For example, instead of x bullets each with action, make it short, resize, convert, rotate etc your video. Same for images and audio. Put the demo video right next to the declaration (“show it, don’t tell”). There is some repetition on the Text, literally one next to each other. e g The Smarter Way to Edit Your Videos, Photos, and Audio Everything you need to edit your videos, photos, and audio effortlessly Or All-in-One Tool Video, audio, and image editing in one app Space-Saving One lightweight app replaces multiple tools If you come to simply my life, make sure your communication is simple, concise and clear.
tobiasbischoff 2y ago
They way you present the pricing makes it seem like a subscription. I really needed to look twice to notice that is actually not a tiered subscription. I would highly recommend to change the way you present the pricing to make it not look like any other AI-SaaS.
jpc0 2y ago
I was wondering how you got around licensing issues, looks like you require the user to install ffmpeg and imagemagic separately which at least respects the license. Just a question seeing as you are targeting Mac as one of the platforms. Did you concider using AVFoundation for some functionality on MacOS? Similar with Microsoft Media Foundation on windows? Although both of those would have less supported formats than ffmpeg licensing is much less of an issue. If you ever do want wide support without the pains of having the user install ffmpeg then for video MainConcept is what I've generally seen used.
- jez 2y ago
  It never occurred to me that ffmpeg’s license had these restrictions on use (I guess that should be obvious in retrospect, it’s LGPL licensed). The ffmpeg docs have an straightforward list of things you have to do to link against ffmpeg and also be compliant with the license, which I found interesting: https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html
feverzsj 2y ago
What about lossless cut? The only good tool I used is Machete. Avidemux is all right but less stable.
- tredre3 2y ago
  You can try the tool creatively named LosslessCut. It's more user friendly than both machete and avidemux but it doesn't support as many container formats (only mp4 and mkv I think). https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
voodooEntity 2y ago
Congratz for this achievment :) I've down developing in private for >15 years now and even tho i wrote alot of stuff i never was motivated enaugh to "publish" something as product that i might need to support. Therefor - my respect!
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Thank you so much for your support!
pyeri 2y ago
Keep up the good work. Both desktop and cloud apps solve problems for users, but there is no doubt a different kind of old school PC era charm in using the former. There is a sense of freedom that comes from the ownership of software and platform while you work with it.
dfedbeef 2y ago
Please offer a non-microsoft-store installer for Windows. I hate using the windows store. I can back up an exe or msi installer, for example. Windows store? Nope. You need an internet connection and need to be signed in. So if the app gets removed from the store later... welp. You're out of luck. No more lifetime license. Shipping an MSI or EXE will help with people who want to use it on WINE as well.
p4bl0 2y ago
The website doesn't even mention FFmpeg which is the open source tool that does all the heavy work. Building a user-friendly GUI is a valuable work in itself (congrats on that, sincerely), but it's not okay to hide the open source tool that does all the work in the background. It should at least be visible in the FAQ that the open source FFmpeg tool is used by the app, with an appropriate link to FFmpeg's website. The tool could be described from the start as a "User-friendly FFmpeg front-end" (but I would understand that this may not speak to its target audience, hence the idea of putting the information way down the page in the FAQ or even the footer, but at least don't hide it).
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  In general I agree, it gives me a sense of wholesomeness when companies open up about this and give credit to the authors of the libraries that their product contains. Credits.md somewhere is sufficient for that to me.
  - anshrathodfr 2y ago
    There is a dedicated page for credits: https://pimosa.app/credits https://pimosa.app/credits
stravant 2y ago
The "Tools" drop-down menu on your site does not automatically close after clicking an item, leaving it obscuring the content. I found that quite jarring.
eps 2y ago
While you are not too far into selling - a word of advice. Switch to offering a year of free updates and charge a small fee after that. Trust me. You will coverge to this scheme sooner or later, so do it now. - Standalone Windows installer is a must. Windows Store is still a deserted wasteland and is not a default choice for the vast majority of Windows users. You are losing a ton of users over this. - ffmpeg and other dependencies need to be acknowledged for both ethical and technical reasons. The technical reason is that your app doesn't depend on OS-supplied codecs and doesn't require installing them separately. And ethical reasons I hope are obvious.
- rubymamis 2y ago
  The problem with distributing standalone installers on Windows is that all non-popular apps are immediately regarded as malware by Windows Defender unless you go through the horrendous process of signing your app, which requires obtaining a certificate (which also requires forming a company that is not an LLC) and waiting more than a month while navigating multiple rounds of bureaucracy. I’ve done it for my app, and it was a terrible experience. Microsoft should study how Apple handles signing and notarization. EDIT: spelling.
  - kryptocannon 2y ago
    > which also requires forming a company that is not an LLC I always thought that an LLC was sufficient, what's the actual requirement if an LLC is not enough?
    - wongarsu 2y ago
      We got a certificate with a company that's the local equivalent of an LLC, and have seen certificates issued to private individuals. As far as I can tell it's up to the issuer who they support in their verification process. Many of them are pretty inflexible with somewhat arcane processes designed decades ago (with ancient websites portals to match), so your experience may vary An additional detail is that there are two levels of code signing certificates, normal and EV (extended validation) certificate. EV certificates make windows completely drop the low-reputation screen and causes many antivirus solutions to trust you but are expensive and are a bit of a pain to get. Normal certificates are cheaper and comparatively easier to acquire, but only give partial benefits (less scary screen from Windows, some leeway from antivirus).
alextselikas 2y ago
Love the website, good job!
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Thank you!
shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
The level of sophistication — from personal site to the product site and desktop app — is impressive.
rq1 2y ago
I’ll try to not be dismissive of the labour, though it’s kind of funny (or actually natural) that the heavy lifting libraries that only a few can actually write are open and free, while the shallow wrappers that everyone can write are paid and closed. Decades ago we were calling out these software and now it’s the norm. Another example along the line: I wanted to extract a frame from a video on iOS, it’s impossible with the built-in tools (screenshot aside) and found that someone built a paid app only for that. I tell you where we’re heading, we’re screwed.
- criddell 2y ago
  I think you are underestimating how difficult making a great UI is (although I haven’t used this application so I can’t say if it’s great or not).
  - lovasoa 2y ago
    Making a good user interface is definitely not easy. Yet it's orders of magnitude easier than writing ffmpeg. That said, there is nothing wrong with a paid wrapper around a large and complex open source library. Distributing their work more widely is not a disservice.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
      > Yet it's orders of magnitude easier than writing ffmpeg. If there's one thing that I've learned, is that "It Depends™" is my mantra. ffmpeg is the sharp end of years of work by a whole lot of folks. It isn't just a single developer's "pet project" (although its originator[0] deserves enormous heaps of credit). It has been maintained by a whole community of really good (and dedicated) developers (and people with all kinds of other skills)[1]. It's not just a library. It's a platform. People have made entire (lucrative) careers, from just "tuning" ffmpeg. Because of the infrastructure provided by ffmpeg, people can build some really useful implementations, and create focused applications. I have found that making an approachable interface for a complex substrate, can be incredibly valuable, and definitely worth paying for. It can often mean the difference between soaring success, and miserable failure. "Easier" is in the eye of the beholder. Ever watch a really, really experienced studio musician at work? They sit down, and in five minutes, your scratches on a piece of paper, take on a magical aspect. They make it look absurdly easy, but that comes from intense practice. There was a documentary (don't remember the name), about a bunch of major musicians, that came out of the California scene, in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In it, there was a discussion about someone (I think it may have been one of the Grateful Dead, or Eagles), that lived above Jackson Browne, who is a very successful singer and songwriter (BTW: The "songwriter" part is the bit that makes the money). They talk about hearing him practice, as he was developing songs. He'd play just a few bars, over, and over, and over again, until he got it right. Songwriters and studio musicians may not be able to command roaring crowds at Glastonbury, but they can give you the album that you'll need, to get that crowd to show up, in the first place. So success requires contributions from many different places, and each has its own measure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard [1] https://www.ffmpeg.org/community.html https://www.ffmpeg.org/community.html
priitmaxx 2y ago
Good job. It’s very hard to start and Finish something.
tapirl 2y ago
The homepage slide animation without JavaScript is impressive!
albumen 2y ago
None of the demo videos work for me, stuck on the loading icon. For both Safari and chrome, iOS 18.3 beta. I agree that "Buy Now" is shown too early. The horizontally scrolling list of feature icons under Buy Now stops scrolling when you tap an icon, and the icon turns blue; but they're not buttons that lead anywhere. And if I want to see the rest of the scrolling icons, I have to deselect the touched icon. I'd suggest not making this an interactable element, and speed up the scrolling a bit. And yes, have someone do a proofreading pass. Look forward to seeing the updated landing page!
MoreMoore 2y ago
Out of curiosity, what programming language and GUI is this written with? Can you write a bit about what the experience was like writing a multi-platform GUI desktop application?
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  Flutter
vlq1 2y ago
“This deployment has been disabled”. You should check your hoster
vlq1 2y ago
“This deployment has been disabled”. You should check your hosting provider
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  just updated!
zac23or 2y ago
AWS can make billions from open source. On the other hand, solo developers who try the same path are basically seen as scammers. Ironic. And creating a good user interface is very, very hard. Otherwise Gimp wouldn't be the monstrosity it is.
- scarface_74 2y ago
  AWS makes billions from managing servers at scale.
  - dbalatero 2y ago
    Come on, that's not all they do. They also resell open source as better-UXified tooling. RDS is "just" repackaged postgres/redis/etc with a more convenient dont-have-to-peek-under-the-hood as much dev experience.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      That “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and dismissing the entire server maintenance and HA across multiple regions is kind of strange But Aurora is not “just” a repackaged MySQL, the entire storage layer was rewritten.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    With gobs of OSS
- p4bl0 2y ago
  Nobody is saying it's a problem to sell a user-friendly wrapper GUI to people who need it. And nobody should be saying creating those is easy. However the developer has to acknowledge the underlying open source tools (FFmpeg and ImageMagick) somewhere on their app's website. Otherwise, yes, there's a clear ethical issue in implying the heavy back-end work is done by your code.
  - dymk 2y ago
vimy 2y ago
Well done. You have a small typo in the Lemonsqueezy page for team licenses.
otherayden 2y ago
Kind of sad to see people hating on this for using FFmpeg behind the scenes. So what? You've created value here by solving the problem of ffmpeg having no user-friendly GUI, which is not easy. Congrats on the launch!
- Y_Y 2y ago
  There are lots of free and friendly frontends to FFmpeg. My choice would be VLC from videolan.org. I think calling the criticism "hate" is an unfair dismissal of the comments as disingenuous. I'd expect that most posters feel neutral, and wanted to share their thoughts in a non-interested way. (I know that VLC uses libavcodec from the FFmpeg project, rather than the frontend also known as FFmpeg.)
  - tredre3 2y ago
    > There are lots of free and friendly frontends to FFmpeg. My choice would be VLC from videolan.org. I've seen this repeated a few times in this thread, yet nobody is naming anything. Can you name a free and friendly tool that allows cropping and trimming videos like OP's? And by friendly we agree that I just have to open the tool, drag my rectangle and click render.
    - Y_Y 2y ago
      Yes, https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut (See also: Kdenlive) I don't agree that's a good definition of friendly but that's ok.
- pdyc 2y ago
  here is another user-friendly gui if you want and it generates ffmpeg command https://newbeelearn.com/tools/videoeditor/ https://newbeelearn.com/tools/videoeditor/
VikRubenfeld 2y ago
You might want to consider removing or changing the word "simple". "Simple" is ambiguous. It might convey ease-of-use, or it might convey "few features/underpowered".
nosioptar 2y ago
The tools dropdown has a problem. It doesn't all fit on my phone screen, but I cannot scroll down to see the rest of the tools. I think this is a great idea. Ffmpeg and imagemagick can be a pain in the ass. I'd buy it off there were a Linux version and an option to improve the contrast. (Grey text hurts my eyes.)
remram 2y ago
Neither the title nor the content mention anything about your app until the "background" part at the end. Why not post "Show HN: Frame-by-frame video cropper"? (If that's even what is does) No one is looking for "a desktop app".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
impoppy 2y ago
Ah yes, another paid ffmpeg wrapper for macOS users.
drowntoge 2y ago
That is one fast loading website you got there.
profile53 2y ago
Your product hunt link is scheduled to go live on Feb 1st, not Jan 2nd.
mfkp 2y ago
Linux version please! Flatpak or appimage : - )
nashashmi 2y ago
Lifetime updates are the way to go at this early stage of the project. Then switch to upgrade plans. Then to annual plans.
wheresmycraisin 2y ago
Charge more
apt-apt-apt-apt 2y ago
Great-looking cross-platform app, was curious how this was possible. Looks like Flutter has third-party libraries for macOS and Windows. I found a damper to the excitement of being able to make great-looking cross-platform apps though, seems Flutter has a big battery drain issue related to rendering blinking cursors that doesn't seem to have been resolved. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29175109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29175109
jjcm 2y ago
Looks great - exactly what I needed. I typically just revert to using ffmpeg directly, so something this simple is all I needed. Only request is 2 devices is fairly minimal for a "personal extended" license, which is likely targeting power users. Would love to see that raised to 3 or 4.
shrisukhani 2y ago
Looks super cool. Congrats and best of luck!
coppsilgold 2y ago
I actually use MPV and bash scripts to do all the listed features and more. I considered making a similar GUI but after carefully reviewing the scripts I decided that there is simply no way to match the degrees of freedom that scripting provides. Most people are unlikely to view scripting as the most powerful user interface available. So there may be a market for a simplified GUI such as this.
pcchristie 2y ago
Does "one device" mean "one device at a time, can revoke and change devices as you change machines" or "one machine, ever, and then re-buy?" I assume the former, and I haven't encountered the latter since the 2000s, but just checking.
ssernikk 2y ago
Good job. May I ask how did you promote your software to get first users? And how long it took you?
bicepjai 2y ago
Congrats on release. One of my use case I struggle with is simple editing long GoPro videos. I like to remove any section of the many videos in the folder, since sometimes they are mundane with no activity. I have not found any tool that will easily allow me to do this, i have to reopen every single file and edit them and save them separately. This is such a pain I have around 1tb family videos waiting to be edited :( will buy it in a heart beat if this tool supports such use case
zquestz 2y ago
"This Deployment has been disabled." This is why people shouldn't use Vercel. The last thing you want is a message like this when people come to your site.
CharlotteThe6 2y ago
[dead]
Kurtcheng 2y ago
[dead]

526 points by anshrathodfr 2y ago

nhggfu 2y ago

great work OP, and really nice website and testimonials. good hunting!

Carrok 2y ago

Congrats! I would work on your demo gifs a bit. The audio wave form one is very frustrating to watch. You select every available option, slowly, and then _finally_ click generate and show about 0.5s of the finished product before the gif loops. It could start with a 5s example of the finished product and _then_ show you all the various options.

sadeshmukh 2y ago

What software do you use for generating those demos of how the software works? Or did you edit them yourself?

contrarian1234 2y ago
The default video editor that comes on my vivo phone seems to have more features than this..
- sadeshmukh 2y ago
  I mean, you don't exactly record it on your phone either.
JusticeJuice 2y ago
I have a hunch it's screen.studio on mac
- sadeshmukh 2y ago
  Thanks! Looks about what I was thinking

h00dinberry 2y ago

What does this do that other similar tools don't? There are millions of video editing apps out there. What's your moat?

jjallen 2y ago
What’s the moat of the millions of others? 99.9% of business don’t and can’t have a moat.
- fuzztester 2y ago
  Yep. You only need a moat if you have a fort.
OccamsMirror 2y ago
Did the OP pitch you for VC? Why do they need a moat?
- somenameforme 2y ago
  I read the GP's post as sarcastic. But Poe's Law makes sarcasm hard.
- h00dinberry 2y ago
  Why should one pay for an app containing features one could get for free somewhere else? A google search for "free video editing software" gets 650M hits... Just to be clear, this isn't a criticism of the software on technical grounds. I don't doubt that the OP knows what he's doing. It's the commercial aspect of it that I don't understand.
debarshri 2y ago
The moat is, it was built by a single dev with capital efficiency. This is what millions of other video editing apps backed by VCs lack. On top of that the app has organic views as it ended up on top of hacker news that lot of these apps haven't.

qntmfred 2y ago

anshrathodfr 2y ago
done

sirjaz 2y ago

Great job, love seeing new desktop apps!!

sgallant 2y ago

Very well done!

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Thank you so much!

gbertb 2y ago

dope! did you use tauri or electron?

anshrathodfr 2y ago
i used Flutter to build an entire app. thank you!

distantsounds 2y ago

[flagged]

aussieguy1234 2y ago
I'm aware of a person who started a "startup" and made a revolutionary new way to resize and manipulate images server side. The whole thing was a simple PHP script invoking imagemagick. They made it available over an API. Sold it to eBay for more than $1M.
- endofreach 2y ago
  "Congrats to being a slave to the capitalist system"
kilohotel 2y ago
This kind of reply is tiresome. Every piece of software is providing an abstraction for libraries. Unless you're sitting there pushing raw machine code, you're just being an annoying hypocrite.
mandevil 2y ago
Building a good UI is not to be sneezed at- it's a lot of very important work to get a user experience that isn't a dreadful series of checkboxes with limited choice. I haven't downloaded this so I can't tell if he has succeeded, but charging for a good user experience on top of a open-source library is a pretty classic thing.
endofreach 2y ago
> congrats on wrapping ffmpeg and charging for it! I doubt that people who are capable of using ffmpeg are the target group here.
raincole 2y ago
"dropbox is just rsync with a bit of cute UI"
kaonwarb 2y ago

deepfriedbits 2y ago

Congrats! The app (and the website) look really polished.

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Thank you!

hedgehog0 2y ago

Congrats OP and it looks really nice! Out of curiosity, may I ask what’s ur tech stack for developing this software? I’m also an aspiring app developer :) Thank you!

avtar 2y ago
Looks like it's "Flutter, sqlite, nextjs" https://ansh.life/projects/pimosa https://ansh.life/projects/pimosa
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  yes it is built using flutter!
  - firemelt 2y ago
    nextjs for what?

contrarian1234 2y ago

"Download Now" does not in fact download now

kilohotel 2y ago

Excited to play with this! Noticed early on you ask for device password. I understand why you are doing it but this is still pretty sus, any other way to install the libraries as needed w/o pw?

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Nothing to be sus about. I use this script to install the libraries that I made open source. https://github.com/Ansh-Rathod/pimosa-builds/blob/main/maclibsinstall.sh https://github.com/Ansh-Rathod/pimosa-builds/blob/main/macli...
- klabetron 2y ago
  Might want to add major version checks particularly with ffmpeg as IIRC filter syntax can vary between major versions (speaking as someone who is pretty sure he’s got an older version of ffmpeg installed because I don’t want to rewrite my scripts).

unshavedyak 2y ago

For video editing, can you put basic text/etc over the video? Ie gifs + text? A refined UX for going from screen capture to stupid gif, on Linux and Windows, would easily be something i'd pay for.

Boldened15 2y ago

Looks great, beautiful landing page and it looks like a labor of love! - Most of the page titles are the (same)[1] which doesn't seem good for SEO. Each of the pages like "Pricing" or "Compress Your Video Files" should be differently named. - The "video compressor" tool would be much more useful if you could enter a target file size. This is a frequent use case, if you want to send a video over email or social media apps like Messenger with a file size limit. The only way I've been able to do that for myself is basically encode it repeatedly with ffmpeg at various quality settings until the file size is just small enough, but you could probably automate that with something more intelligent like a good guess and a binary search. I'm sure someone's made a library to do that already though. - It needs a whole bunch of features related to subtitles, like making a subtitled GIF from a video file with subtitles. - Maybe risky to include copyrighted work like the Spider-Verse movie in the demo video? Unless you really did rip it legally from a Blu-ray. - There are random grammar mistakes and capitalization issues throughout the site, nothing major but worth a pass by a native English speaker. "What kinda files Pimosa supports?" and "Every files gets processed on your device only" as some examples. Might give some people pause. - Could be worth to have a more prominent "Download" box at the top section that automatically detects your OS. Most landing pages have that so I assume it works. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpimosa.app https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fpimosa....

zwnow 2y ago
Does SEO really matter still? I have seen a few videos that show how the SEO algorithm works a few months ago, at least googles, and you basically can't optimize in that regard.
- JoeOfTexas 2y ago
  For search engines, not so much. But it helps for linking to pages on social media.
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
  The app developer showing his desktop app here is also a part of SEO, so it always matters.

senkora 2y ago

Small nitpick: on your user testimonials, you list reddit users as r/<username> when the correct way to do it is u/<username>.

latexr 2y ago
> Small nitpick Nitpick on your nitpick: By definition, all nitpicks are small. This isn’t important, but I thought you might appreciate the meta commentary.
- MichaelApproved 2y ago
  Nitpick on your nitpick: It’s possible for something to be small, relative to something that is already considered small. Things that are considered small can still have variations in the extent of their smallness.
- krsdcbl 2y ago
  nitpick on your nitpick on the nitpick: a "metacommentary" would be if you'd be commenting on your own text. That's even less important, but I thought you might appreciate such asides
  - j_bum 2y ago
    Wouldn’t it be meta commentary if we’re discussing the nature of the comments, regardless of who made them? If not, what type of commentary would it be?
  - vendiddy 2y ago
    Are there any contenders to provide a nitpick on this?
- csallen 2y ago
  Even though saying "small nitpick" is redundant in terms of its literal meaning (denotation), communication is about more than simple denotation. It's also about emphasis, tone, and emotions, and saying "small nitpick" can be a good way to soften criticism and add a little humility and politeness.

behnamoh 2y ago

so basically a wrapper for ffmpeg and imagemagick.

kaptainscarlet 2y ago
which is perfectly fine because not everyone wants to do everything on the command line

batmaniam 2y ago

nice! was this built in electron?

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Built using almost native-like using flutter, not electron.

newusertoday 2y ago

how are you able to get around ffmpeg licensing since it is client app which requires you to open your code if you use ffmpeg GPL?

anshrathodfr 2y ago
it uses homebrew to install the FFmpeg on the user's device. the app doesn't bundle any libs to comply with their license limitations.
globalnode 2y ago
O_o, well that was a short lived app.
- odo1242 2y ago
  FFmpeg is LGPL, not GPL. This means that you can link it in non open source apps and only have to open source modifications to FFmpeg itself.
levkk 2y ago
It does not require that you do that. It only requires you to open source any modifications you've made to ffmpeg.
- newusertoday 2y ago
  it is slightly more nuanced, if you do static linking it is considered derivative work and does requires you to open it. Since the app is based on ffmpeg which is GPL(core is LGPL) i am curious to know how it is getting used.
  - anshrathodfr 2y ago
    i didn't bundle the ffmpeg in the app. It uses homebrew to install ffmpeg on the user's device. this is the acceptable way since ffmpeg confirms it on twitter/X. https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1766649563891339510 https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1766649563891339510

joshSzep 2y ago

I really wanted to click on the features as they slid by to learn more about them. I was disappointed when I couldn't.

can16358p 2y ago

Congratulations! The app and the site looks really cool. A very very small issue on website. In the FAQ section it says "Every files gets processed on your device only" I think "files" should be "file" there. Nothing really important, just my perfectionism :) Keep up the good work!

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Thank you so much! i'm currently building the new landing page and have updated all the things there.

kyrra 2y ago

May I suggest not offering lifetime updates? All software that does this ends up getting around it in the end because they realize they need to get more money from existing customers to actually stay afloat. Normally by releasing the product under a slightly different name or some other sleight of hand. The model like jetbrains does with IntelliJ I think is decent. Or look at smaller software like sublime text or ArqBackup (we're a license is forever for a specific major release of the software)

adastra22 2y ago
Maybe I'm old school, but I won't "buy" (rent?) subscriptions for software. I expect to own it outright, at to receive at least security updates for a reasonable time period.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > I expect to own it outright Unless you are the legal creator or buy the copyright, you never own software outright, you license it from the owner (or its public domain and has no owner.)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - layer8 2y ago
    At least in Europe, you do own the copy of the software you bought. The first-sale doctrine applies. https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2012-07/cp120094en.pdf https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...
- thfuran 2y ago
  Do you expect to receive a free car every new model year after buying one outright?
  - Sanzig 2y ago

rhinoceraptor 2y ago

It looks awesome and very handy, I found a few minor UI issues, I'm trying the Windows version on a 4k monitor. * The "< Home" button when you enter video/audio/photo tools is only clickable and changes color when hovering below the text, I would suggest making that a larger blue button. This doesn't happen for the "< Back" button which is in the same area when you're in a tool * If the upper image crop handles are all the way at the top, they aren't clickable, they don't show the resize cursor. When you drag them it moves the window instead of the crop handle I have a few suggestions: * I'm not sure how feasible this is, but I think video should have a similar combined crop/flip/rotate UI instead of separate ones like for photos * It seems like batch processing is a first class notion in the app, which is definitely very handy, but I think maybe it should be a mode toggled by a radio? I think a lot of use cases are just one off uses, in which case the UI can be made a lot simpler. If I'm just working on one file, I would prefer to be dropped right into the tool editor rather than having to click edit. * 2 devices for the extended license is still a little too limited in my opinion. I would make it so authenticating the app to a computer requires access to the email that purchased it, and then make the extended license unlimited. I don't think you have to worry about that getting used for a team since it would require access to the email account.

layer8 2y ago
Regarding the last point, I’ve seen companies doing exactly this, making the purchase through an admin account and relating the license info to each employee that needs it. Nevertheless, I agree that two devices is too restrictive, it should be five or so.

azinman2 2y ago

The video editor seems extremely useful. Id consider making that more of a hero in describing the app. NB: “Privacy Alert: Files are uploaded to third-party servers.” Wraps oddly on my iPhone, resulting in squishing the circle.

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Yes, Thank you. I need to work on the landing page.

lovegrenoble 2y ago

I won't rent a subscription for any software

georgeecollins 2y ago
My understanding is it's a one time purchase, lifetime update for a single user. If you misunderstood this I am guessing because you didn't click on the "license option" buttons because it sounded like subscription software. That's a good thing for the dev to know, because I agree, this doesn't seem like something I would pay for monthly or yearly, but I might buy.

lovegrenoble 2y ago

Without Pimosa "Always searching on Google for free tools" Ok, I'm fine with it

szundi 2y ago
They meant searching for free tools but finding crap/malware

lovegrenoble 2y ago

I love Filmora Perpetual license: https://filmora.wondershare.com/sales-promotion.html https://filmora.wondershare.com/sales-promotion.html

valryon 2y ago
Too many useless AI features in the last version of Filmora, the user experience is really degraded now.
- lovegrenoble 2y ago
  Agreed with you

nirav72 2y ago

Does the video editor allow combining clips of various resolution and aspect ratios?

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Yes, but it will export in only one consistance aspect ratio.

georg-stone 2y ago

Wow! The UI looks stunning, looks very intuitive, and seems like you've spent a lot of time on this. Great job!

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Yes! I spent lot of time on UI Thank you.

madduci 2y ago

Congratulations. Do you plan to launch a Linux version?

rib3ye 2y ago

Here is my feature request for osx: I capture many screen recordings using quicktime command+shift+5. I would like to select multiple screen recordings, right-click, and send them all to a single app to: compress, merge, save to new video or export straight to gif with preset default.

mansarip 2y ago

This is very inspiring. I quit using Flutter because the required size was too large, including cache and so on. I’m only using a 256GB Mac M1. Anyway, the UI is beautiful, you must have some design skills already.

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Damn! I built the app on the same machine. thank you so much!

yusunglee2074 2y ago

Were you originally interested in video editing, photography, and other things like that? How did you come up with the idea to create a program like this? Tell us a little more about it, please.

zerr 2y ago

Why did you choose that particular payment processor?

nazmul21 2y ago

Looks so great. Congrats on your launch.

jimmySixDOF 2y ago

If this had screen capture recording integration I would 100% buy ! I have been on handbreak for years and what you have does look like an improvement. Good luck and congratulations!

omnimus 2y ago
What does screen recording have to do with encoding app? Its completely different type of app (quite hard btw) with different UX requirements. Its like saying if it could do spreadsheets i would 100% buy it.

JusticeJuice 2y ago

Bonus bug report, underscores in filenames seem to mess with things. E.g. DCS_0035 and DCS_0036 both resolve to DCS_(1), overwriting each other.

anshrathodfr 2y ago
This is a big issue and I'm pushing the fix update ASAP!

JusticeJuice 2y ago

Good job! Small bug report, when the UI is downloading the FFMPEG binaries, the UI says 'Astimed time' instead of 'Estimated time'.

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Thank you for reporting! I fixed it in the new version.

Tepix 2y ago

Looks great, congrats! Your roadmap is outdated.

omnimus 2y ago

Looks real pro! I am in middle of moving to linux but damn apps like these make me think i should keep my mac. Two common image usecases (maybe just not documented on site) that i regurarly need. - .heic input support from airdropped iphone images - JpegXL .jxl support as i am moving my image library to this format for space saving and futureproofing I assume its imagemagicks fault but maybe low hanging fruit as the library updates.

fl0id 2y ago
There’s some similar apps… maybe not one that combines all these though
tobiasbischoff 2y ago
You can just right click any HEIC File and convert it instantly to JPG from the Finder.

tzury 2y ago

Congratulations! A. The better call Saul on the video demo is cheerful. Thanks for putting a smile on my face. B. You want to convey simplicity, then do that on the copy. For example, instead of x bullets each with action, make it short, resize, convert, rotate etc your video. Same for images and audio. Put the demo video right next to the declaration (“show it, don’t tell”). There is some repetition on the Text, literally one next to each other. e g The Smarter Way to Edit Your Videos, Photos, and Audio Everything you need to edit your videos, photos, and audio effortlessly Or All-in-One Tool Video, audio, and image editing in one app Space-Saving One lightweight app replaces multiple tools If you come to simply my life, make sure your communication is simple, concise and clear.

tobiasbischoff 2y ago

They way you present the pricing makes it seem like a subscription. I really needed to look twice to notice that is actually not a tiered subscription. I would highly recommend to change the way you present the pricing to make it not look like any other AI-SaaS.

jpc0 2y ago

I was wondering how you got around licensing issues, looks like you require the user to install ffmpeg and imagemagic separately which at least respects the license. Just a question seeing as you are targeting Mac as one of the platforms. Did you concider using AVFoundation for some functionality on MacOS? Similar with Microsoft Media Foundation on windows? Although both of those would have less supported formats than ffmpeg licensing is much less of an issue. If you ever do want wide support without the pains of having the user install ffmpeg then for video MainConcept is what I've generally seen used.

jez 2y ago
It never occurred to me that ffmpeg’s license had these restrictions on use (I guess that should be obvious in retrospect, it’s LGPL licensed). The ffmpeg docs have an straightforward list of things you have to do to link against ffmpeg and also be compliant with the license, which I found interesting: https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html

feverzsj 2y ago

What about lossless cut? The only good tool I used is Machete. Avidemux is all right but less stable.

tredre3 2y ago
You can try the tool creatively named LosslessCut. It's more user friendly than both machete and avidemux but it doesn't support as many container formats (only mp4 and mkv I think). https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

voodooEntity 2y ago

Congratz for this achievment :) I've down developing in private for >15 years now and even tho i wrote alot of stuff i never was motivated enaugh to "publish" something as product that i might need to support. Therefor - my respect!

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Thank you so much for your support!

pyeri 2y ago

Keep up the good work. Both desktop and cloud apps solve problems for users, but there is no doubt a different kind of old school PC era charm in using the former. There is a sense of freedom that comes from the ownership of software and platform while you work with it.

dfedbeef 2y ago

Please offer a non-microsoft-store installer for Windows. I hate using the windows store. I can back up an exe or msi installer, for example. Windows store? Nope. You need an internet connection and need to be signed in. So if the app gets removed from the store later... welp. You're out of luck. No more lifetime license. Shipping an MSI or EXE will help with people who want to use it on WINE as well.

p4bl0 2y ago

The website doesn't even mention FFmpeg which is the open source tool that does all the heavy work. Building a user-friendly GUI is a valuable work in itself (congrats on that, sincerely), but it's not okay to hide the open source tool that does all the work in the background. It should at least be visible in the FAQ that the open source FFmpeg tool is used by the app, with an appropriate link to FFmpeg's website. The tool could be described from the start as a "User-friendly FFmpeg front-end" (but I would understand that this may not speak to its target audience, hence the idea of putting the information way down the page in the FAQ or even the footer, but at least don't hide it).

pandemic_region 2y ago
In general I agree, it gives me a sense of wholesomeness when companies open up about this and give credit to the authors of the libraries that their product contains. Credits.md somewhere is sufficient for that to me.
- anshrathodfr 2y ago
  There is a dedicated page for credits: https://pimosa.app/credits https://pimosa.app/credits

stravant 2y ago

The "Tools" drop-down menu on your site does not automatically close after clicking an item, leaving it obscuring the content. I found that quite jarring.

eps 2y ago

While you are not too far into selling - a word of advice. Switch to offering a year of free updates and charge a small fee after that. Trust me. You will coverge to this scheme sooner or later, so do it now. - Standalone Windows installer is a must. Windows Store is still a deserted wasteland and is not a default choice for the vast majority of Windows users. You are losing a ton of users over this. - ffmpeg and other dependencies need to be acknowledged for both ethical and technical reasons. The technical reason is that your app doesn't depend on OS-supplied codecs and doesn't require installing them separately. And ethical reasons I hope are obvious.

rubymamis 2y ago
The problem with distributing standalone installers on Windows is that all non-popular apps are immediately regarded as malware by Windows Defender unless you go through the horrendous process of signing your app, which requires obtaining a certificate (which also requires forming a company that is not an LLC) and waiting more than a month while navigating multiple rounds of bureaucracy. I’ve done it for my app, and it was a terrible experience. Microsoft should study how Apple handles signing and notarization. EDIT: spelling.
- kryptocannon 2y ago
  > which also requires forming a company that is not an LLC I always thought that an LLC was sufficient, what's the actual requirement if an LLC is not enough?
  - wongarsu 2y ago
    We got a certificate with a company that's the local equivalent of an LLC, and have seen certificates issued to private individuals. As far as I can tell it's up to the issuer who they support in their verification process. Many of them are pretty inflexible with somewhat arcane processes designed decades ago (with ancient websites portals to match), so your experience may vary An additional detail is that there are two levels of code signing certificates, normal and EV (extended validation) certificate. EV certificates make windows completely drop the low-reputation screen and causes many antivirus solutions to trust you but are expensive and are a bit of a pain to get. Normal certificates are cheaper and comparatively easier to acquire, but only give partial benefits (less scary screen from Windows, some leeway from antivirus).

alextselikas 2y ago

Love the website, good job!

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Thank you!

shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago

The level of sophistication — from personal site to the product site and desktop app — is impressive.

rq1 2y ago

I’ll try to not be dismissive of the labour, though it’s kind of funny (or actually natural) that the heavy lifting libraries that only a few can actually write are open and free, while the shallow wrappers that everyone can write are paid and closed. Decades ago we were calling out these software and now it’s the norm. Another example along the line: I wanted to extract a frame from a video on iOS, it’s impossible with the built-in tools (screenshot aside) and found that someone built a paid app only for that. I tell you where we’re heading, we’re screwed.

criddell 2y ago
I think you are underestimating how difficult making a great UI is (although I haven’t used this application so I can’t say if it’s great or not).
- lovasoa 2y ago
  Making a good user interface is definitely not easy. Yet it's orders of magnitude easier than writing ffmpeg. That said, there is nothing wrong with a paid wrapper around a large and complex open source library. Distributing their work more widely is not a disservice.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    > Yet it's orders of magnitude easier than writing ffmpeg. If there's one thing that I've learned, is that "It Depends™" is my mantra. ffmpeg is the sharp end of years of work by a whole lot of folks. It isn't just a single developer's "pet project" (although its originator[0] deserves enormous heaps of credit). It has been maintained by a whole community of really good (and dedicated) developers (and people with all kinds of other skills)[1]. It's not just a library. It's a platform. People have made entire (lucrative) careers, from just "tuning" ffmpeg. Because of the infrastructure provided by ffmpeg, people can build some really useful implementations, and create focused applications. I have found that making an approachable interface for a complex substrate, can be incredibly valuable, and definitely worth paying for. It can often mean the difference between soaring success, and miserable failure. "Easier" is in the eye of the beholder. Ever watch a really, really experienced studio musician at work? They sit down, and in five minutes, your scratches on a piece of paper, take on a magical aspect. They make it look absurdly easy, but that comes from intense practice. There was a documentary (don't remember the name), about a bunch of major musicians, that came out of the California scene, in the late 1960s/early 1970s. In it, there was a discussion about someone (I think it may have been one of the Grateful Dead, or Eagles), that lived above Jackson Browne, who is a very successful singer and songwriter (BTW: The "songwriter" part is the bit that makes the money). They talk about hearing him practice, as he was developing songs. He'd play just a few bars, over, and over, and over again, until he got it right. Songwriters and studio musicians may not be able to command roaring crowds at Glastonbury, but they can give you the album that you'll need, to get that crowd to show up, in the first place. So success requires contributions from many different places, and each has its own measure. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabrice_Bellard [1] https://www.ffmpeg.org/community.html https://www.ffmpeg.org/community.html

priitmaxx 2y ago

Good job. It’s very hard to start and Finish something.

tapirl 2y ago

The homepage slide animation without JavaScript is impressive!

albumen 2y ago

None of the demo videos work for me, stuck on the loading icon. For both Safari and chrome, iOS 18.3 beta. I agree that "Buy Now" is shown too early. The horizontally scrolling list of feature icons under Buy Now stops scrolling when you tap an icon, and the icon turns blue; but they're not buttons that lead anywhere. And if I want to see the rest of the scrolling icons, I have to deselect the touched icon. I'd suggest not making this an interactable element, and speed up the scrolling a bit. And yes, have someone do a proofreading pass. Look forward to seeing the updated landing page!

MoreMoore 2y ago

Out of curiosity, what programming language and GUI is this written with? Can you write a bit about what the experience was like writing a multi-platform GUI desktop application?

anshrathodfr 2y ago
Flutter

vlq1 2y ago

“This deployment has been disabled”. You should check your hoster

vlq1 2y ago

“This deployment has been disabled”. You should check your hosting provider

anshrathodfr 2y ago
just updated!

zac23or 2y ago

AWS can make billions from open source. On the other hand, solo developers who try the same path are basically seen as scammers. Ironic. And creating a good user interface is very, very hard. Otherwise Gimp wouldn't be the monstrosity it is.

scarface_74 2y ago
AWS makes billions from managing servers at scale.
- dbalatero 2y ago
  Come on, that's not all they do. They also resell open source as better-UXified tooling. RDS is "just" repackaged postgres/redis/etc with a more convenient dont-have-to-peek-under-the-hood as much dev experience.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    That “just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and dismissing the entire server maintenance and HA across multiple regions is kind of strange But Aurora is not “just” a repackaged MySQL, the entire storage layer was rewritten.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  With gobs of OSS
p4bl0 2y ago
Nobody is saying it's a problem to sell a user-friendly wrapper GUI to people who need it. And nobody should be saying creating those is easy. However the developer has to acknowledge the underlying open source tools (FFmpeg and ImageMagick) somewhere on their app's website. Otherwise, yes, there's a clear ethical issue in implying the heavy back-end work is done by your code.
- dymk 2y ago

vimy 2y ago

Well done. You have a small typo in the Lemonsqueezy page for team licenses.

otherayden 2y ago

Kind of sad to see people hating on this for using FFmpeg behind the scenes. So what? You've created value here by solving the problem of ffmpeg having no user-friendly GUI, which is not easy. Congrats on the launch!

Y_Y 2y ago
There are lots of free and friendly frontends to FFmpeg. My choice would be VLC from videolan.org. I think calling the criticism "hate" is an unfair dismissal of the comments as disingenuous. I'd expect that most posters feel neutral, and wanted to share their thoughts in a non-interested way. (I know that VLC uses libavcodec from the FFmpeg project, rather than the frontend also known as FFmpeg.)
- tredre3 2y ago
  > There are lots of free and friendly frontends to FFmpeg. My choice would be VLC from videolan.org. I've seen this repeated a few times in this thread, yet nobody is naming anything. Can you name a free and friendly tool that allows cropping and trimming videos like OP's? And by friendly we agree that I just have to open the tool, drag my rectangle and click render.
  - Y_Y 2y ago
    Yes, https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut (See also: Kdenlive) I don't agree that's a good definition of friendly but that's ok.
pdyc 2y ago
here is another user-friendly gui if you want and it generates ffmpeg command https://newbeelearn.com/tools/videoeditor/ https://newbeelearn.com/tools/videoeditor/

VikRubenfeld 2y ago

You might want to consider removing or changing the word "simple". "Simple" is ambiguous. It might convey ease-of-use, or it might convey "few features/underpowered".

nosioptar 2y ago

The tools dropdown has a problem. It doesn't all fit on my phone screen, but I cannot scroll down to see the rest of the tools. I think this is a great idea. Ffmpeg and imagemagick can be a pain in the ass. I'd buy it off there were a Linux version and an option to improve the contrast. (Grey text hurts my eyes.)

remram 2y ago

Neither the title nor the content mention anything about your app until the "background" part at the end. Why not post "Show HN: Frame-by-frame video cropper"? (If that's even what is does) No one is looking for "a desktop app".

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

impoppy 2y ago

Ah yes, another paid ffmpeg wrapper for macOS users.

drowntoge 2y ago

That is one fast loading website you got there.

profile53 2y ago

Your product hunt link is scheduled to go live on Feb 1st, not Jan 2nd.

mfkp 2y ago

Linux version please! Flatpak or appimage : - )

nashashmi 2y ago

Lifetime updates are the way to go at this early stage of the project. Then switch to upgrade plans. Then to annual plans.

wheresmycraisin 2y ago

Charge more

apt-apt-apt-apt 2y ago

Great-looking cross-platform app, was curious how this was possible. Looks like Flutter has third-party libraries for macOS and Windows. I found a damper to the excitement of being able to make great-looking cross-platform apps though, seems Flutter has a big battery drain issue related to rendering blinking cursors that doesn't seem to have been resolved. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29175109 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29175109

jjcm 2y ago

Looks great - exactly what I needed. I typically just revert to using ffmpeg directly, so something this simple is all I needed. Only request is 2 devices is fairly minimal for a "personal extended" license, which is likely targeting power users. Would love to see that raised to 3 or 4.

shrisukhani 2y ago

Looks super cool. Congrats and best of luck!

coppsilgold 2y ago

I actually use MPV and bash scripts to do all the listed features and more. I considered making a similar GUI but after carefully reviewing the scripts I decided that there is simply no way to match the degrees of freedom that scripting provides. Most people are unlikely to view scripting as the most powerful user interface available. So there may be a market for a simplified GUI such as this.

pcchristie 2y ago

Does "one device" mean "one device at a time, can revoke and change devices as you change machines" or "one machine, ever, and then re-buy?" I assume the former, and I haven't encountered the latter since the 2000s, but just checking.

ssernikk 2y ago

Good job. May I ask how did you promote your software to get first users? And how long it took you?

bicepjai 2y ago

Congrats on release. One of my use case I struggle with is simple editing long GoPro videos. I like to remove any section of the many videos in the folder, since sometimes they are mundane with no activity. I have not found any tool that will easily allow me to do this, i have to reopen every single file and edit them and save them separately. This is such a pain I have around 1tb family videos waiting to be edited :( will buy it in a heart beat if this tool supports such use case

zquestz 2y ago

"This Deployment has been disabled." This is why people shouldn't use Vercel. The last thing you want is a message like this when people come to your site.

CharlotteThe6 2y ago

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Kurtcheng 2y ago

[dead]