About SheFF

SheFF is a shell frontend to FFmpeg. Colloquially, it may be described as a video converter, which is what it is most commonly used for.

For End Users

SheFF's user interface is menu-driven. Users are prompted with options to build their FFmpeg command, which is to be run, edited (temporarily), or saved as a shell script. It softens the hardships from using the FFmpeg command line tools, and possibly demonstrates the basic structure of said commands. Options resemble their FFmpeg counterparts, so some familiarity is recommended.

For Developers

SheFF is designed to be quickly extensible. Its menu-driven user interface complements its array-centric data structure. In addition to menu selections, there are utility functions for reading integers (within a range), booleans, and times; as well as those that interact with underlying data. With this power, adding a single-argument option can take only thirty seconds.

For Us

SheFF became part of the [EDEN Workstation System] in early 2022 as EWS FFmpeg Helper. As such, parts of the infrastructure can be seen in its code. Its growing complexity spun it off into its own project. Its proven usefulness over the year publicized it to what it is today. We named it SheFF because of its likeness to a restaurant chef (notice the pronunciation), with FFmpeg being the kitchen, and the user as the customer. Though initially, its name was inspired from [WinFF], a graphical FFmpeg frontend.

For Me

This project is a throwback to one of my longest-running computer activities. I have used at least a dozen of converters--including [XMedia Recode]--before finally learning to use FFmpeg's command line tools. With this frontend, I hope to have made everyone's workflow a bit easier, just like those before me.