I am sure there is but google is overflooding us with results that comply with its search criteria instead of really free and accurate results

Also it doesn't have to be with AI , I know it's the actual trend but you don't need AI to transcribe , we didn't need before and it's surely not a necessity now

it's urgent , for a school test

I'm drowning in a sea of WMV files with all sorts of different specs - bitrates, frame rates, resolutions, you name it. I'm looking to convert them all to MP4 for better compatibility, but the manual work in Handbrake is killing me.

Ideally, I'd love some free software that can analyze these WMV files and automatically choose the best MP4 settings to minimize quality loss while keeping the file size reasonable. Any recommendations from the video conversion gurus out there?

Thanks in advance!

I'm working on a project and need to create animated GIFs from a bunch of videos. Ideally, I'd like a free software tool that can do two things:

1. Extract frames: Automatically capture a snapshot of each video every second (or user-defined interval).
2. Batch processing: Process all the videos in a folder at once, saving them as individual GIFs.

Does anyone have any recommendations for free software that can handle this? Open to all suggestions, even if they involve separate tools for each step. Thanks!

Edit: Solution found (For Window):

Here's how you can create the batch script:

1. Open Notepad: Open Notepad or any other text editor you prefer.
2. Write the Script: Copy and paste the following script into Notepad:

"u/echo off

for %%i in (*.mp4) do (

mkdir "frames"

ffmpeg.exe -i "%%i" -vf "fps=1/20" -q:v 2 "frames\%%~ni_%%03d.png"

ffmpeg.exe -framerate 4 -i "frames\%%~ni_%%03d.png" -vf "fps=4,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos" "%%~ni.gif"

rd /s /q "frames"

) off

for %%i in (*.mp4) do (

mkdir "frames"

ffmpeg.exe -i "%%i" -vf "fps=1/20" -q:v 2 "frames\%%~ni_%%03d.png"

ffmpeg.exe -framerate 4 -i "frames\%%~ni_%%03d.png" -vf "fps=4,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos" "%%~ni.gif"

rd /s /q "frames"

)"

1. Save the Script: Go to File > Save As. Choose a location to save the script file. Name the file something like convert_videos.bat and make sure to select "All Files (.)" from the "Save as type" dropdown menu. Click Save.
2. Close Notepad: Close Notepad.
3. Place the Script in the Video Folder: Move the convert_videos.bat file to the folder where your video files (.mp4) are located.
4. Run the Script: Double-click the convert_videos.bat file. A command prompt window will open, and the script will start converting the videos to GIFs.

This script will loop through all .mp4 files in the folder, and for each file, it will use FFmpeg to create a GIF by taking a snapshot of one frame every second (fps=1) and scaling the output to a width of 320 pixels (you can adjust this value as needed).

The output GIF files will have the same base name as the input video files, but with the .gif extension.

https://youtu.be/4DahcWMVHeM

Team HERMES is proud to reïntroduce Paige, a time-tested, cross-platform, professional-grade solution for building apps featuring long-form styled-text viewing and manipulation capabilities. This is a very loosely circumscribed problem (encompassing everything from e-mail message composition to HTML authoring); this library, therefore, is incredibly full-featured. Moreover, meticulous care has been taken to document each of these features in the official, 841-page OpenPaige User's Guide.

Paige came to us through an I.P. acquisition that was undertaken as part of the industry-typical "yak shaving" for an unrelated project; personnel considerations grapple with the possibility of its further development, and the wisdom or not of moving qualified staff from an application to a mere library, no matter how widely used, is debatably justified.

In hopeful obviation of the difficult questions that would ensue either way, we have embarked upon a third course of action: releasing the complete C source code under the GNU Lesser General Public License, making it free as in speech and free as in beer. In fact, if you have pertinent knowledge and are conversant with Git, we'd welcome your contributions.

The project is hosted on Github at https://github.com/nmatavka/HERMES-Paige and on SourceForge at https://sourceforge.net/p/hermes-paige

I'm using windows 10. I'd like to make thumbnails for my most commonly used URLs.

I was assuming windows software at first, but a browser extension might also work. I use all the browsers.

Thank you.

🤗🤗🤗

Shelf.nu

Free for individuals. Free if you self host.

Paid cloud plans available.

https://github.com/Shelf-nu/shelf.nu

For years and years, you have chickened out and done your tax returns using proprietary software, relying on an accountant, or by hand like the oldies, and the inner nerd in you has been feeling great shame every time. But there is a way out!

I didn't know of any piece of F/LOSS software allowing to do income tax declarations in Canada and started to work on proof of concept code last summer ; a few weeks ago as the new Canadian tax season pointed its nose again, I got a sense of urgency and decided to pursue this, and have open sourced it (AGPLv3 + DCO) and continued to work on it.

For now it is far from being usable for anybody, as there is no graphical user interface, and it takes some Python-fu to operate, but if one can write text and some code, have residence in Québec (we started with this scenario) and a simple situation (T4 + RL-1 slips), and are ready to "invest" time in a solution that doesn't involve proprietary software, it's almost useful ;)

At the moment I am extending a warm invitation for people who could see an interest in contributing, possibly because they can use the software for this year or be ready for the next... I'm looking for people who could hang around in the issue tracker or discussion room, have their 2¢, take a look at the code, maybe try to do dummy declaration, and if they had done one using commercial software or an accountant, compare vs. mapletax's results, maybe integrate code for other provinces, more situations, architectural improvements, user interfaces, thinking about e-filing... anything could help the project from moving further than just processing the current (two) contributors' returns.

The documentation is currently spartan, but the code is also quite small: < 1000 SLOC for the engine part, about 1000 SLOC for 2 years of federal stuff and 1000 SLOC for 2 years of Québec stuff, meaning that if you intend to declare one year you could clone, strip the files you know you don't need, and quickly audit the remaining code to gain absolute trust that it won't do you harm, then you can also audit the code to review correctness of the computations.

The code is written in a way that it's the most auditable, with minimal dependencies and "separation of concerns".

At the guts of the software there is some symbolic computing (using sympy), computational geometry and graph theory (using networkx). Printable PDFs are the government ones (traceability is provided) and they are drawn on using cairo and pypdf.

US people already have UStaxes, but maybe some people with "special concerns" could get inspired from mapletax.

The entry point is https://gitlab.com/mapletax/

Thank you for your attention!

im looking for a Watermark Remover for Videos and Images in batches.

Can someone suggest me a good one? its small watermarks but they are annoying.

I put them on my pictures/videos to protect my work but its more damaging to my business than it is helping so any help is appreciated.

Greetings from Goa...  hope's all well at your end.
Just to let you know that I'm working on an ebook (possibly with a limited print run too) of a book called Who's Who of FOSS in India.  This is my attempt at building links and creating visibility for FOSS in India. It is open to anyone who is committed to the idea of promoting FOSS (Free and Open Source) in India, and has done something concrete to this goal -- coding, community organising, whatever...
If you agree, kindly share the details in the following format:
NAME:  
EDUCATION: 

ALMA MATER (one or more institutions where you studied):

YOUR CONTRIBUTION TO FOSS (FREE AND OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE): 

YOUR CONTACTS (email, phone, WhatsApp, what you're comfortable with): 

HOW YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE INDIA CONTRIBUTING MORE TO FOSS:

Please share a photo too, close-up and face-only, preferably informal and smiling!

(Kindly help me to share this with others who you feel should be included too.)

Thanks so much, FN

https://preview.redd.it/oemabi2ekkqc1.png?width=1410&format=png&auto=webp&s=77e4327073af5c0915a3e1c41f81a150fa9bfba9

​

​

​

I see a lot of macro recorder that has premium feature (such as infinite repeat and so on) or are really difficult to learn. So, with my python knowledge, I programmed a totally free and open-source macro recorder with an friendly user interface!

Github repo here: https://github.com/LOUDO56/PyMacroRecord

Oddly, this topic has had little disucssion on popular fronts besides on one reddit thread and on HackerNews. I tried posting this on the python and softwareengineering subreddit but it was deleted. With this sudden and unfortunate change, PySimpleGUI projects running version 5 or newer are now tied to online DRM that could become inoperable at any moment.

Now, end users will need to register an account with PySimpleSoft to bypass the obtrusive "30 day free trial" limitation on unlicensed projects. Commercial developers will need to pay 99$ a year in perpetua to embed developer keys into their software that presumably could become invalid the moment the developer stops paying or has their account deleted. In other words, PySimpleGUI-based projects are now very fragile.

This disaster provides an opportunity for developers to learn the native tk GUI library for Python, which should be the first choice for a developer now since PySimpleGUI has proven itself to be capable of changing its license and direction overnight.

What are your thoughts, Reddit?

(Missing Resource Tag)

If you are used to installing executable software, you may feel quite inconvenienced when first moving to free software. You have seen what free software is, what freedoms it gives you, how transparent it is, the greater control over computer it offers you and have decided to start using free software- the only problem is, you don't know how to get started. If you are someone like this, this guide is for you.

Free software, unlike proprietary software is distributed in source form. So there is no installer to install it for you But you can use free software compiled to binary files like AppImage if all you want to do is just use the software. You don't could install free software, but building it from source is what gives you the freedoms of free software (specifically, the ability to view/modify source code). Building software means converting the source code (human-readable text) into machine-readable binary files. The installers that you use, only install the binaries. So there is no way for you to read the source files as text and make modifications. However, free software being distributed in source form allows you to read, understand and modify the code before building your changes.

Zip files (or other archive formats) are what you usually find free software distributed as. All you have to do is unzip the archive file and then build the source.

How to build from source?

There are two steps here:

1. Configure
2. Build

Configuring involves figuring the build parameters as per the device and environment. This is important, because binary files built for one device/OS usually don't work in other devices/OS. During the configure process, all details about the hardware architecture and OS is gathered so that the next step works well.

The next step, building is when the executables are created by compiling and linking the source files. The information about the system that was found from the configure step is used to make sure that the correct executable (that is compatible with the system) is built from the source.

There are tools to configure and build free software which come installed with Free/Open Source OS. They are autoconfigure and make. Any free software today comes with two files in the software zip: configure and makefile. These two commands usually work to build the software:

./configure

make install

Then again, you may have to fix errors if you find any. Although you can let the author know about the bugs, having control over the software you use is the exact reason why free software exists. If you want control and transparency, free software is for you. It is a white-box giving you full control of the system. Nothing is hidden. But with this freedom, you also need to know what you are doing.

For any information related to free software, check out the following website:

gnu.org

If transparency and control beats convenience for you, here's a list of things to learn:

1. Learn C and C++ Programming with gcc
2. Learn Bash
3. Learn Make and MakeFiles
4. Learn about autoconfigure

All this is available on gnu.org

There's a lot more depth to this. I might post more in future. Feel free to comment your queries and/or add your opinions/understanding.

Hello, redditors.

I've lost access to my old account, where I originally uploaded aur-watcher, so I made a fork of my own project.

This utility was originally created to look for packages in AUR.

Now it provides ability to look for packages in official Arch Linux repository. And it provides new output regime. You scroll through pages of found items.

https://github.com/hdvpdrm/aur-watcherhttps://github.com/hdvpdrm/aur-watcher

As the Digital Markets Act comes into effect today, Device Neutrality starts to become a tangible reality in the European Union. While acknowledging the new law, the FSFE alerts that this is only the first step and further commitment is necessary.

Ever since the retirement of Macrium Reflect Free Edition I've been researching for months on end for a possible open-source alternative to its game changing virtualization functionality that was implemented through VirtualBox with a program called viBoot. If anybody remembers this program or had the chance to use it to any extent, you may remember how cool it was. For whatever reason I personally had the most difficult time with errors in VirtualBox for years before I got it to work, a longer story for another day.

What matters is there came a point where I finally got viBoot to load a virtualized instance of one of my Macrium Reflect system images and I was so excited because this saves time and SSD wear & tear in the event that I may have to go back between system images should an image I need to restore to be missing something critical from the corrupted image. Ideally this would not be the case when a system restore is your only remaining option but in reality, you can just never count on it. I'll create system backups regularly but if I ever reach a point where I have to use one, I do so with the expectation that I may or may not remember or have saved/documented the changes made since that image. Tbh I really advocate for virtualization as a solution to fill the gaps in this regard.

The problem is, Macrium Reflect is the only program that I have ever used at least personally that I've seen to do this where it can use VirtualBox to boot a whole system image. After Reflect Free retired, I had auto-updates turned on and cannot go back to the last version that could launch Free version even if I wanted to. And even if I could, the vulnerability and holes start coming into play the longer that Windows updates without it. That's when I started thinking ok...

It's nerf or nuthin'. Oh wait sorry, wrong phrase. It's open-source or nuthin'. 😆😆

I'm more or less quitting 3rd party apps altogether after this experience and only installing a new tool if it's open source inasmuch as I can get away with it at least. This got me thinking hey, if Macrium could boot a system image in virtualbox, then from an open source standpoint, maybe I can figure out HOW they did it. In reality, there could be another app doing it now, but I have to figure out what file type I need.

50+ bookmarks later, it's hard to tell from tutorials and documentation if a program will create a file that is VirtualBox-bootable. The first file type I'd suspect I need is a .IMG file but which programs make this? I'm aware from light reading that it's an older file type used in floppy disk days. Another candidate might be .WIM files which I don't know much about or good ol' VDI or VHID files if there's an imaging solution to create those. (Longshot)

If anybody still with me this far into this sortof long post, much thanks. I'm writing in hopes that at least somebody somewhere has had similar thoughts to these cross their mind and come across possible solutions.

I'm curious to gauge the general view of free software advocates on pushing breaking changes.

View Poll

Hey everyone!

This is my first post here, and I'm pretty excited to share my project with you all. I've recently built a free and open-source expense tracker app called Flow, for Android and iOS.

It's still in beta, so I'd love for you amazing folks on r/freesoftware to check it out and give me some feedback! Any suggestions or bug reports are highly appreciated.

Here's where you can find Flow:

GitHub repo: flow-mn/flow

Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mn.flow.flow

TestFlight (iOS): https://testflight.apple.com/join/NH4ifijS

Hope you like it!

Today's outage provides a very relevant opportunity to plug the Freedom Respecting Technology movement I've been building: https://makesourcenotcode.github.io/freedom_respecting_technology.html

So as some of you may have noticed Facebook/Meta was down for a few hours today. Next time it could easily be the site hosting documentation for that FOSS project you use at work. Oh and also your team's sprint is ending today so you really need to finish off that feature you've been working on. Whoops.

For the more business oriented folks here, remember basing your company on non-FRT FOSS projects is a very bad idea. For the more ideologically oriented folks like me, please consider some of the ethical arguments I'll bring up later.

What this (and other more relevant incidents like man.openbsd.org being down a few months ago) goes to show is that FOSS in it's current forms simply doesn't cut it these days. Sure the main program sources are one click of a download link (or at worst a git clone command) away. But what about the rest of the allegedly open educational material such as any official documentation that may exist? Withholding that from easy offline download in BOTH source and built forms is FUNDAMENTALLY no better than withholding part/all the main program sources.

It's time for FOSS to shift it's myopic view from just whether the main program sources are open to whether the system as a whole is open. It's time to make sure the full Open Knowledge Set associated with a technology is truly free. Sources, documentation, data sets, etc.

If it isn't absolutely trivial to make a full and clean copy of the Open Knowledge Set associated with a system it is not truly free. Needing a constant network connection to properly study something claiming to be open isn't freedom. Needing the site hosting an allegedly open work to always be up isn't freedom.

Those of us that are FOSS users should accept nothing less than that.

Those of us who are FOSS makers don't owe our users any particular set of features, but we absolutely do owe them true openness and the ability to truly study the system and exercise Freedom 1. If users can't trivially enumerate and start downloads for any educational materials associated with your project within say 15 seconds of having read the elevator pitch on the home page and decided they're interested in studying/using/contributing to it you have failed as a FOSS maintainer. Period. End of story.

Looking for an online or download software that fixes your eyes so it makes it look like you're looking at the screen. That way I can read a script/ teleprompter while it looks like I'm looking at the screen.