- 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....

I disagree. Any page that sports a big "buy now" button without even scrolling but has at that point not even shown me a single screenshot will have a hard time catching my attention. I didn't look further.

Would love to see examples of nice landing pages that _don’t_ do this and also aren’t big enough companies that you’ve already heard of them (10b plus companies may not need to do this as they’ve earned the scroll in brand recognition and likely have more than one product line).

Can I get a discount if I copy edit your site and docs for you? :) But, yea, agree that the typos give pause.

> - Could be worth to have a more prominent "Download" box …

And make it more clear what downloading gets you. Is it a trial? Or just a version of the app that doesn’t save?

Reading through the site and docs, I get the impression you’ve spent more time getting license keys to work than anything else. Certainly at least in the way of docs.

Congrats on the first release.

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.

  -

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.

  -

EDIT: spelling.

This is not true, not as phrased.

A. You can get a cert issued in your personal name. Not an EV one, but still.

B. You are likely to already have a company if you are selling online.

C. It doesn't take "a month" even for an EV cert. Several days tops unless you go through Comodo, in which case you get what you pay for.

D. It is perfectly fine to distribute unsigned installers. They produce a warning on launch, granted, but contrary to the urban legend they are not getting instantly shit-canned by the Defender.

B. That's not always the case with indie developers.

C. Well, it took me. My cert authority was GlobalSign.

> but contrary to the urban legend they are not getting instantly shit-canned by the Defender.

That was not my experience. Try to download an unsigned binary using Edge and see what happens. From what I remember (I'm on macOS, mostly), they are "getting instantly shit-canned".

https://www.advancedinstaller.com/trusted-signing-integratio...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/trusted-signing/over...

I've recently used two different vendors, replied within minutes to each of their queries in hopes of expediting the process, but each time it took the better part of 2 months before I was in possession of a USB signing key.

This is for a Delaware C-corp, so it was about as vanilla as it could be for their side.

It took some searching, but it turns out that they spun off their non-subscription certificate business under the name of GoGetSSL. This entity resells other vendors too, but if you get their "own" certificate, which is the cheapest of the bunch, the validation is done by Digicert. So, that's the answer for the time being.

Entrust, Globalsign, Certum are way more expensive, slow and bureaucratic. Comodo (or Sectigo, which is the same thing) are just utter crap. Their validation process is an India-outsourced torture. Never again. Not even for free.

I always thought that an LLC was sufficient, what's the actual requirement if an LLC is not enough?

However, as the other post said, Windows will treat an EV certificate with very high trust and should not show SmartScreen. For OV signed software, it looks like [3] Microsoft will use some telemetry to assemble a trust score as people download and accept the risk of running the software, over days or weeks.

[0] https://support.ksoftware.net/support/solutions/articles/358... KSoftware is a sales partner for Sectigo. I used their service and later Sectigo directly, before last year's change to require FIPS hardware for managing the code signing certificate.

[1] https://www.cookcountyclerkil.gov/vital-records/business-not...

[2] https://support.ksoftware.net/support/solutions/articles/232...

[3] https://stackoverflow.com/a/65653792/504994

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).

100% agree! I've been using Windows for over 20 years and I haven't installed a single app through Windows Store.

Source: I just installed Enterprise 11 on my desktop a week ago and I had to manually install Microsoft Store manually.

Ironic.

And creating a good user interface is very, very hard. Otherwise Gimp wouldn't be the monstrosity it is.

HN is a community of hackers, not business people that are only commercially interested. But Hackers need money too, so we also need to be a little bit commercial. But it would be ideal if we could be commercial without having to give up the hacker ethic.

But many people don't believe it's easy to be open source and commercial at the same time. Why would people pay if they don't have to?

I'm thinking of a new form of software licencing: what if we make a license that says that a particular piece of software must become open source after for example 5 years. Then the developer can sell the software they wrote for 5 years long, and after that it will become open source.

This would give FOSS developers more motivation to create software, and the community will benefit eventually, so people won't feel too hesitative paying for the software, because it will eventually benefit everyone.

From what I read here daily, it is becoming an anti-hacker, anti-worker, anti-individual and pro-big business community.

One of the proofs is this theread. You can see People defending AWS... BUT my point is not AWS is wrong, but supporting AWS and criticizing individuals is what is wrong.

And no one noticed this, and has already started defending AWS.

This is something...

people did, it's just that you get attacked or reported if you do so, not this thread specifically but in general

But Aurora is not “just” a repackaged MySQL, the entire storage layer was rewritten.

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).

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.

I have seen absolutely miraculous backends, totally pooched, because the library developer thought that GUI was for "wusses."

> now i have lession that i shouldnt build apps that consumes so much time.

Sounds like somebody really devoted to the perfect UI experience.

Look, I don't want to talk down this kid. Everybody starts somewhere and I like the enthusiasm. But him expecting to make $30 off everybody for plumbing together a bunch of FOSS libs is rubbing me the wrong way.

That's not true Dropbox was in the technical edge when it came, and old time ago, was barely possible, and the recurrent cost of the severs and operation cost is clearly not the same. And pay Foss GUIs are sad state of reality

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

It’s the HN version of “less space than the Nomad. No wireless. Lame”

https://m.slashdot.org/story/21026

Building ffmpeg is very different from an SSL lib. They need different tradeoffs, design strategies, domain knowledge, etc. And doing them properly is really really hard. A lot of software out there sucks, in part because there is more focus on marketing than on correctness and reliability.

If roads had the same quality as software then traffic deaths would be an order of magnitude higher.

Try working on a library used in tech that your life depends on and you might re-consider your road metaphor.

> Building a road is usually very similar to building another road.

It's a similar process, but so is building software. That's entirely besides my point though, which you seem to have missed entirely.

Case in point: I regularly use a free iOS app that is clearly the result of someone's deep passion in taking what could have been a simple wrapper and turning it into an incredibly simple but powerful interface to complete a useful task efficiently and at any scale... and that task is exactly what OP was trying to do...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/frame-grab/id1319670797

But as someone who's somewhat familiar with app store optimization, I guarantee the creator did none of that that.

Their app name would need to be something obnoxious like "Frame Grabber Extractor: Pic from Video" to capture all the different searches people do for this task.

And the people focused on distribution are even paying for ads with the money they make their IAP infested "1 week trial; $4 a week" alternatives make.

There's nearly 2 million lines of code in the FFMPEG codebase: unless you're building the next Adobe Premiere, no matter how much value you provide, you are building an extremely shallow wrapper around FFMPEG when you build an interface to crop videos.

No one is saying a shallow wrapper can't provide value, but most of the value for the end user is derived from FFMPEG, not the layer you added to it.

If we took FFMPEG and your wrapper and separated them, FFMPEG could still do the one task that your users need: it would be harder, and it would be less convenient, but it can still crop videos. Your tool would no longer do anything but draw rectangles where we'd like a crop to appear. It'd meet no user needs at all.

-

Also to clarify my stance, there's nothing wrong with shallow wrappers, and I've made shallow wrappers: I know finding the user need, and thinking of the right UX and figuring out distribution is all a lot of real legwork.

But I also find it's important to realize when most of the value you're providing is enabled by something you built on. There shouldn't be shame in admitting that you wrapped something that was powerful and potentially unwieldy for your segment of users and made it useful.

There are other options, many of them have been mentioned in this discussion.

I suppose my main point is that the apparently new quite inexperienced guy, as appreciated as his enthusiasm is, should at some point understand that all the tech he uses for free didn't fall from the sky and just whipping the cream that floats on top for personal profit is not a sustainable model. Even though that seems to be the trend these days.

You can fault the FOSS community for promoting default libre licensing that created the “exploitable” nature of this, but the fact of the matter is that people creating software are able to make a choice. They can make a different choice if they wish.

This is about a green kid coming along and quickly churning out lots of half-baked solutions, asking for frankly quite a lot of money for those, apparently without acknowledging the giants on whose shoulder they are standing. Legally they have the right to do so, sure. But we as a community can give push back in that that's not how things will work in the long run. I encourage you to check out his personal home page, you'll see what I mean. (And again, I generally applaud the enthusiasm. But those things would better be suited as portfolio-building personal OSS projects on github rather than trying to squeeze the dollars.)

There is a difference between legitimate business interests after large investments, and freeloaders.

What exactly does this mean?

Why? They are under no obligation to do so, and then they are working for free. (A common trope related to FOSS, often argued on this very website)

> There is a difference between legitimate business interests after large investments, and freeloaders.

What large investment are you talking about? The thousands of hours of free labor that went ffmpeg? Yeah. See also all of the open source software that went into the operating system and utilities they built everything on. That doesn’t stop people from selling proprietary software, so why is this any different?

This is free market capitalism. If they can find people to pay $29 for a copy of this wrapper, more power to them. That also happens to be a much more powerful resume bullet point.

We are talking decades of work, dealing with platform issues, performance, loads of security considerations and then there is the whole licensing+patent topic.

Sure UI work is hard, but of the whole package, it's only the visible part of the iceberg and now I'm expected to give $30 to the person who only contributed that last piece? Of course it's work too but if not at least half that money is being donated to the underlying FOSS projects then I'm out.

Another suggestion: open source your app. Those who don't know how to compile/build it, or are too lazy, which will be most, they can pay for the convenience, and you'll have the income you expect, but at least you are giving back to the community on whose work you are basing yours.

> self-taught full-stack developer who wrote the first line of code in the 2020 Corona lockdown.

You my friend are standing on the shoulders of giants. Time to ack them.

If I felt that people should give me a cut of any commercial software they build on top of my library then I would try to express that in my choice of license.

Though we as a community can still have views regarding kids hacking things trying to profit off decades of hard work by a large community. Different if they contribute back obvioisly. There are lots of compromise models out there.

Edit: Softened unreasonably provocative expressions

And the mask slips. Maybe don't gatekeep software using licenses as they are designed to be used

Though acting legally and acting ethically/responsibly are still different things.

You did read the rest of my post right?

No, you are not expected to pay $30 to anybody.

If the distribution of the money make you unhappy, just pay $30 to this guy and $30 to the other project (or $150 using a x5 ratio sugested in other comment).

Or you can use the free CLI, or a free alternative.

Even better, you can write a free clone of this app and distribute it for free. Just remember to choose the licence carefuly. You'd probably like AGPL that makes comercial use very difficult.

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.

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

[1] https://www.ffmpeg.org/community.html

That said, what's the free and open source version of this tool? There are some great open source video editors like Shotcut, Openshot, KDENLive, Blender, etc., but I think this tool is more like CyberChef for video?

PowerToys is Free and Open Source, and has at minimum an image resizer utility. It's a good starting point for adding on richer functionality like a preview GUI, and I'm sure that the basic video and audio manipulation would be appreciated as additions. Also since it's a Microsoft sponsored project, I imagine that the signing process is drastically different than what OP has experienced.

I know that's really not satisfying to say that "someday we could have this in the FOSS space", but everything starts somewhere.

Though editors like Shotcut and KDENLive are considered non linear since you can layer on different effects, while OP's utility is definitely not that.

Context: a big chunk of my 2024 income was from grant money to build open source software that I may have tried to monetize otherwise. It’s possible.

Gives everyone the option of picking free or paid options, depending on people’s needs.

However I don't think it's fair to call this a "shallow wrapper". It's clear that a lot of work went into the design of this GUI and, and making user-friendly interfaces is also an important work (that is far too often overlooked in the open sources communities).

Yet the fact that FFmpeg, the tool that does all the heavy background work, isn't even mentioned anywhere on the website, even in the FAQ or the footer is at least a non-negligible ethical problem.

UPDATE: The same goes for ImageMagick that I just saw this app installs and uses too.

The licenses for both ffmpeg and ImageMagick do not require anyone to mention them in the website.

However, if they are being re-distributed, there are clear obligations for providing source code and attributions. Omitting to do so is a violation of the legal obligations.

We dismiss these things as wrappers on HN because we like to believe that the technical side is 90% of the work.

But this belief has an easy antidote: ask to see the "UX" (lmao) we built.

* 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.

Nevertheless, I agree that two devices is too restrictive, it should be five or so.

Nitpick on your nitpick: By definition, all nitpicks are small. This isn’t important, but I thought you might appreciate the meta commentary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm

When I was a kid, tuna and tuna fish were two different things.

Tuna was tuna straight out of the can, with nothing added. After all, the can says tuna right on it.

Tuna fish was tuna mixed with mayonnaise and crunchy things like pickles and celery. It was what today would be called tuna salad.

So if mom asked, "would you like a tuna sandwich for lunch?" we would reply "can we please have a tuna fish sandwich instead?" Because who wants plain tuna in a sandwich?

If she asked if we wanted a tuna salad sandwich, we would be completely confused. Is it a salad or is it a sandwich?

OTOH, "tuna fish" was indeed a common phrase back in those days (mid 20th century) as a synonym for canned tuna. It appeared on tuna can labels and advertisements. Here are some examples:

https://www.google.com/imgres?q=%22tuna%20fish%22%20advertis...

https://www.palosverdespulse.com/blog/2021/6/25/it-tastes-li...

Over the years, "tuna fish" fell out of common use, which may explain why you haven't heard of it.

Here is a conversation I had with ChatGPT 4o about this:

https://chatgpt.com/share/677988fd-28b0-8012-af63-5bd59985a2...

To answer your question, no, we never said salmon fish or anchovy fish. Just tuna fish.

Language and its evolution is an interesting thing!

I did use Miss Chatty (ChatGPT 4o) as a research assistant, and cited my discussion with her in my comment.

If you don't mind, I am curious to learn what signals in my comments led you to think that I am an AI. :-)

Maybe there is something you know about me that I don't know!

But don't mind me. Just found it curious. You don't seem like an AI from your profile, but these days one can't be sure anymore. Cheers!

They even wrote an entire Book for me to read. I haven't read the whole thing (or even much of it), but it has advice like this:

"Do not use harmful words, but only helpful words, the kind that build up and provide what is needed, so that what you say will do good to those who hear you."

Wait, I think that is in the Hacker News guidelines! I knew I read it somewhere.

Things that are considered small can still have variations in the extent of their smallness.

If not, what type of commentary would it be?

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)

Did that company not want to make money? Even if they want to pretend their software is done, there is incentive to just change the name, add a new feature or two, and maybe poke at the UI so it looks different enough to be a definitely new product that you should buy and not mostly the same as last time.

1) Free lifetime updates 2) No subscription, but limited updates 3) Subscription model

The parent was suggesting no. 2 (what you would find acceptable as well).

In theory you could have a single binary that never changes, ever, but it's just unrealistic.

Subscription models are fine, Jetbrains is the fallback if you're going to be super adamant about refusing to fund ongoing development, but software is not like other products. Maybe in the past when it was very simple within a simple ecosystem it was different.

There's something to be said for reducing the pricing to something more sustainable and more explicity upstream donations, but "pay once, have the developer continue to work for me for free if I keep it long enough" isn't realistic.

https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...

One time purchase plus yearly renewals to keep the product operating are one shaky legal grounds.

We probably don't have any of that with software, yet.

Just read his webpage, it's quite obvious.

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.

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://github.com/Ansh-Rathod/pimosa-builds/blob/main/macli...

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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

NB: “Privacy Alert: Files are uploaded to third-party servers.” Wraps oddly on my iPhone, resulting in squishing the circle.

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.

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.)

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

    All-in-One Tool Video, audio, and image editing in one app

    Space-Saving One lightweight app replaces multiple tools

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".

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

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

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.

I have been on handbreak for years and what you have does look like an improvement.

Good luck and congratulations!

Shipping an MSI or EXE will help with people who want to use it on WINE as well.

I assume the former, and I haven't encountered the latter since the 2000s, but just checking.

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.

Anyway, the UI is beautiful, you must have some design skills already.

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Ok, I'm fine with it

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