Ah-ha, thanks for the update on Docker! Saves me going down that rabbit hole 😅

On the files on the NAS: yep, that’s by design. My files are across the WAN, not LAN, so I built it to stage remote files locally before transcoding. It currently pulls a file, transcodes it, and moves it wherever you chose for output. This does mean that going over a network is slow, because you have to wait for the staging and cleanup before doing another file. That’s deliberately conservative though; I wanted to avoid saturating networks in case the network operator takes exception to that sort of thing. A secondary benefit is that the disk space required for operations is just twice the size of the source file - very low chance of having to pause a job because the disk monitoring detected there’s no room.

I’ll look at putting in an override that disregards the network and treats remote files as local for you!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Precision mode

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are now!

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

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

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

Haha yes, I use it regularly! And yes, it’ll be plenty fast on your system. I have very deliberately gone over the code base looking for inefficiencies six times now, so it runs nice and lean - I do an efficiency/hygiene pass every couple of releases to make sure bloat doesn’t creep in.

As [email protected] said, CPU encoding is slow but it preserves the most quality. No kidding, it really is night and day compared to GPU encoding - for this, just tick “Precision mode” in HISTV. It’s about 1x speed on most videos, so a 45 minute file will take about 45 minutes.

GPU does go a lot faster, my 7900 XTX rips through 1080p at about 28x speed so a 45 minute file takes about 2 minutes. This is good enough for most content; just untick “precision mode” and set the multiplier to 2x or 3x with a bitrate of 4 if you want better GPU quality in HISTV. The multiplier says how high the peak bitrate can go, so you keep more data for fast-moving scenes, without forcing the encoder to keep useless data for slow scenes.

This is super helpful (and I see that “btw”, you got a smile with that one (⁠☞ﾟ⁠ヮﾟ⁠)⁠☞). Thank you for the heads up and all this detailed information! I’m excited to check out Certum.

there seem to be very few people who simultaneously - pathologically dislike using Windows regularly - still want to make it easier for people on Windows to minimize Windows Defender complaints when running software that they build

Describes me to a T 😅 My career is rooted in support, so my pathologies include trying to make things end-user easy.

There really aren’t many to be honest, Tdarr is super powerful! But the setup is a lot, at least on first run. The main point of HISTV is for the times when you can’t be bothered to set up tdarr, like if you only have to do spot conversions, or for people who don’t want to learn how to use Tdarr. But there are a few features unique to HISTV!

I have built in disk space monitoring so your drive doesn’t fill up during encoding, which tdarr doesn’t do; I don’t know if tdarr supports turning gif/webp/mjpeg/apng into MP4/MKV; also, tdarr doesn’t auto detect your hardware, where HISTV does a few test transcodes on startup to determine not only what hardware is available but whether the encoder for that hardware is working.

1. Thank you! I am obnoxiously proud of myself for that one 😅

2. That’s actually how this all started for me haha! I was sitting there tweaking the same command as I hit videos with different formats or quality levels, and I thought to myself that it’d be a lot easier with just a few smarts like detecting if a video is already at the target quality level. The first version was actually just a winforms GUI wrapping that very PowerShell command - it’s come a long way in just a few weeks.

3. Subler is interesting! Hmm. Currently HISTV just copies over ask the subtitle tracks directly. I think I could add a subtitle function like Subler’s to bake in subtitle tracks, if the user has the subtitle file they want to use. Would that be useful? Metadata download from the internet is messy though, I might want to leave that to the existing *arr solutions.

Thank you! And yes, it can - you can put the HISTV command for the CLI version in a custom script in Settings -> Connect -> Custom Script:

_Edit: I’ve got a full guide up for Sonarr/Radarr integration, which can be simple or as complicated as you want to make it, here: https://github.com/obelisk-complex/histv-universal/blob/main/Sonarr-Radarr-Integration.md_

Thank you very much, that’s very kind! 😊

I didn’t know I could get the cert from elsewhere, I appreciate the heads up; my experience lies mainly in networking, rather than software. I’ll open that possibility back up, then. It’d be a first for me, and I’m getting a real taste for firsts with this project!

I’m not taking anyone’s money, though, even Windows users (right now, that includes me… I’m working on it lol). I’m doing this purely for the love of the game!

Hey bud, this is a neat project! I ran your codebase through my own Claude Opus 4.6 instance with extended thinking on, against a “code quality” skill I worked up with the bot the other day. The skill prioritises security, code efficiency, and enforcing end-user usability over taking shortcuts. It found a lot more than the 8 security issues I opened, but I didn’t wanna flood your issues section until I’m sure you’re happy for me to contribute like this.

Anyway, cheers, and good luck!

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I’m right there with you, bud. I tried StoatChat too, and I got a nice email from the German government about using an outdated version of React with RCE vulnerabilities. I think this must be a very difficult problem to properly solve, given the number of different approaches and how all of them have their own issues to contend with. Nextcloud Talk is the most usable option I’ve found because it does voice, video, and screen sharing and it also has call links you can send for unregistered people to join the calls. But performance is spotty even with the “high performance backend” set up (that may be due to my server being in Germany though 😅).

As to being accused of using AI, don’t let it get to you. The people yelling the loudest can’t tell the difference between handwritten code and AI, because they can’t code. If you pull down your repo, you’ll be depriving people who might be able to use your project because of trolls who never would have tried it in the first place.

I do use AI for coding, and I’ve gotten plenty of hate for it, but also people who don’t care and just want the functionality of the tool I built.

And in fact I’m going to check out your project and see if I can get it up and running, so please don’t take it down. I’ll likely be putting it on my German server so I’ll let you know what the performance is like with extreme round trips 😁

Would be easier to contribute to XMPP or Matrix IMO.

Synapse is in the middle of a rebuild without much compatibility between the legacy and new builds, and it’s a pain in the dick to set up at the moment. I know, because I did it.

XMPP I haven’t tried to set up yet, but I imagine it to be similarly in-depth.

As to why not contribute: edit: not AI, they just don’t have the confidence in their own skills to contribute to anyone else’s project.

Now… why do the whole thing from scratch instead of forking? Great question. XMPP might just need a nice coat of paint, if it can handle voice and video and screen share; I haven’t come away with great impressions of matrix/synapse.