wapm-cli VS ffmpeg.wasm

To actually compile this we can use a tool called WABT (WebAssembly Binary Toolkit). It's basically a mess that requires CMake and I couldn't get it to run on WSL and I wasn't going to install MinGW. Instead there's a nice tool called WAPM from Wasmer which works like npm for webassembly packages and since it's been compiled down to webassembly we can run it in any environment. In fact we don't even need to add configuration so long as wapm is installed. We can run wax wat2wasm -- wat/mat.wat -o wasm/mat.wasm. wax is like npx for npm. If you're wondering the command we give wax is defined by the wasmer/wabt package: https://wapm.io/wasmer/wabt. Also for some reason you can't prefix local paths with ./ so wax wat2wasm -- ./wat/mat.wat doesn't work which tool me a while to figure out. Anyway this provides a nice simple compile environment if you want to work on raw WAT files.

That's the main reason we should start using WebAssembly for distributing and using packages.

Shamless plug: Wasmer [1] and WAPM [2] could help a lot on this quest!

[1]: https://wasmer.io/

[2]: https://wapm.io/

There's WAPM

If it's buildable for the WebAssembly WASI target, consider also distributing it through WAPM.

I don't know if many people have heard of it, but there's actually a WebAssembly Package Manager. It's similar to crates.io, except you upload WebAssembly binaries written in any language instead of Rust source code!

You can see this paying off with wapm, which lets you download applications that would have normally required compilation for your environment and run them anywhere with a supported runtime, which is imo pretty neat.

One step closer to the day when I can put actix-web creations up on WAPM so "Just type wax my-cool-thing to try it out" can be one of the distribution options.

I've added limited support to run wapm.io directly from the Terminal. Examples of commands that work well are wapm cowsay {Text} and wapm uuid.

There's already ffmpeg wasm. I've used it in projects. Works great.

https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

There's a low-hanging fruit that I think would make ffmpeg more helpful for regular people.

There's a million terrible websites that offer file conversion services. They're ad-ridden, with god-knows-what privacy/security postures. There's little reason for users to need to upload their files to a third-party when they can do it locally. But getting them to download fiddly technical software is tough - and they're right to mistrust it.

So, there's a WASM version of ffmpeg, already working and hosted at Netlify [1]. It downloads the WASM bundle to your browser and you can run conversions/transformations as you wish, in your browser. Sandboxed and pretty performant too!

If this tool a) was updated regularly b) had a nicer, non-CLI UI for everyday users and c) was available at an easily-Googlable domain name - it would solve all the problems I mentioned above.

[1]: https://ffmpegwasm.netlify.app/

As their github page says, based on https://ffmpegwasm.netlify.app ...

I'm guessing no one did GPU-optimizations? I saw a web app (not an ffmpeg transpilation) that went clever and used WebGL so it can access the GPU and use its parallel processing capabilities...

ffmpeg.wasm: The engine making all these happen. However, I’m a bit concerned about its current situation. The repo has not been updated for more than six months now, and that’s not a healthy sign for an open-source project. Clearly I was reading the commits wrong. The author mentioned “speed up x264 with SIMD intrinsics” in their roadmap (https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm/discussions/415), which, if landed, could make such on-device video editors much more competitive.

I use https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm and I want my FFMPEG commands to be hidden from others.

Possibly using this? https://github.com/ffmpegwasm/ffmpeg.wasm

You could try using something like ffmpeg wasm which is a way of using ffmpeg client side in browser. Unfortunately WebAssembly only supports files less than 2 gigabytes, which is a problem for videos. And I don't know if ffmpeg wasm contains ffprobe, so you might have to find another project or try to compile ffprobe to wasm yourself. This stuff is out of my wheelhouse so I can't offer much help.