I Made the Ultimate File Converter

Comments · 4.7K

• PO

  @PortalRunner · 7 months ago (edited) · pinned

  <b>Frequently Asked Questions:</b><br><b>Q:</b> Why is <i>____</i> format not supported? Can you please add it?<br><b>A:</b> There’s a lot of file formats out there, and it can take hours to do the research and write the code for even just one. Supporting <i>literally</i> every format is impossible, but we’re constantly working on adding support for as many as we can. Check in later, maybe we’ll have it then! Also, please don&apos;t ask me to add new formats. I&apos;m moving on to different projects, I can&apos;t keep updating this forever. I&apos;m only merging pull requests from community contributors now.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Is there a downloadable offline version?<br><b>A:</b> There is now! Electron builds for all major desktop operating systems are available here: <a href="https://github.com/p2r3/convert/releases">https://github.com/p2r3/convert/releases</a>. Though please note, these versions are <i>entirely offline</i> and thus won&apos;t receive automatic updates.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Is the website down?<br><b>A:</b> Very unlikely. I&apos;ve been getting some reports about network errors when visiting the site, which seem to be caused by the user’s ISP blocking the link for some reason. One way to fix this might be to use a VPN if you have one, or to download the local version. Alternatively, call your ISP and complain. Either way, there&apos;s likely nothing wrong with the website itself. It&apos;s hosted by GitHub, so as long as that&apos;s up, this website should be, too.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Why didn&apos;t you use Pandoc for documents?<br><b>A:</b> I wasn&apos;t aware of it, whoops! It has since been implemented. However, it does still have the same drawback as Mammoth - it completely ignores formatting. So we currently still fall back to my custom tool for some documents.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Is this a virus?<br><b>A:</b> No. This is a fully open-source project hosted directly off of GitHub, which means that anyone can read the exact code used in the website. Even if I <i>was</i> trying to hide a virus in this, someone would almost certainly have noticed it by now and would&apos;ve reported my repository to GitHub. Some people have also pointed out that this site gets 3/95 on VirusTotal. This is a false positive, where 3 vendors likely veered on the side of caution simply because this isn&apos;t a normal website.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Why didn’t you use a spectrogram for audio to images?<br><b>A:</b> I did! What I describe in the video <i>is</i> a spectrogram. The only difference is that I also encode the phase.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Why didn’t you use SSTV for audio to images?<br><b>A:</b> SSTV is far more arbitrary and limiting than a spectrogram. It was designed for encoding very specific kinds of images as audio, and doesn’t generalize well outside of that. For example, if you convert a song to an image via SSTV, you’ll get garbage. If you do it with a spectrogram, you’ll get a visualization of the input audio. On top of that, SSTV is limited to a finite set of image “modes” (resolutions), whereas a spectrogram isn’t. At the end of the day, both methods are lossy, but a spectrogram is just more visually meaningful.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Why use this when I can just rename the file’s extension?<br><b>A:</b> Changing the file extension is not the same as actually converting to a different format. It might <i>seem</i> like it works, because many programs are able to tell what the actual format is even with an incorrect extension. However, in reality, the reason we have different file formats is because they have different properties, such as varying levels of quality, compression, different metadata, and so on. If renaming actually worked, we would only have one file for each media category. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Does it support YouTube links?<br><b>A:</b> No, not locally. Browser security systems don’t allow us to fetch YouTube content from a third-party site.<br><br><b>Q:</b> Was this made by AI?<br><b>A:</b> No. The vast, vast majority of this project was hand-made. As with any tool, AI has its uses, but replacing the entire workflow is not one of those. That said, as mentioned in the video, one snippet was prompted (and reviewed!), mostly to replace an otherwise heavy library. Again, it’s a tool. Some will say that the ethics of AI development prohibit its use in <i>any</i> context, and that&apos;s a fair stance to have. If you feel this way, I&apos;m sorry. I do sympathize with that stance, the same way that I sympathize with activists for animal rights or climate change. Even so, I still eat meat, and so do most people, while still hoping that one day we&apos;ll treat animals responsibly. In the same vein, I do occasionally use AI (as a tool), while hoping that one day we&apos;ll figure out how to handle it responsibly. So while you may choose to label me a bystander on this issue, let it be clear that <i><b>I do not support AI overindulgence.</b></i><b></b> There&apos;s nuance to these things.<br><br><i>(There used to be an analogy involving nuclear energy here, but turns out people are more divided on that than I thought.)</i>

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• RO

  @RollingLine111 · 7 months ago

  Bad apple, but the audio is an mp4 and the video is an mp3

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• TG

  @TGamer3999 · 7 months ago (edited)

  finally, i can convert .png to .jpeg

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• SY

  @Syphin_0 · 7 months ago

  This started as a portal 2 channel btw

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• CH

  @ChickenNugget56545 · 6 months ago

  Finally i can listen to my images while reading through an animation

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• IN

  @invisy.arcticfox · 7 months ago

  finally, i can convert .blend files to .psd

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• HA

  @Harryterry651 · 7 months ago

  now I can 3d print the bee movie

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• HE

  @hesmo_smm · 7 months ago

  finally i can convert .jpg to .jpeg

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• PN

  @pnt5228 · 4 months ago

  Finally i can convert GTA VI.png to GTA VI.exe

  179

• TI

  @TimesChu · 7 months ago

  Of course you know, you have single-handedly revolutionized the ARG puzzle genre.

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• EL

  @Elfara_ · 7 months ago

  Cool, now we can turn .pdf to .exe, to execute the PDF files.

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• IB

  @ibish74 · 7 months ago

  Finally converter that runs locally and don&apos;t have limits

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