FFkit

FFkit is a free, open-source desktop app built by Paul Marchiset in 2026 that puts a clean graphical interface on FFmpeg for compressing and converting video. FFmpeg can convert, compress and repair almost any video or audio file in existence, but it's a command-line tool — so instead of learning a flag, most people upload personal footage to some random "free online converter" and hope there's no watermark at the end. That trade-off never made sense to me: the computer already has everything it needs to do the job instantly and offline.

I built FFkit natively for Windows, macOS and Linux with Tauri and Rust rather than Electron, bundling a real FFmpeg binary as a sidecar so it never touches whatever's already on the system. It opens onto two doors into the same engine — a three-button Simple mode for anyone, and an Advanced mode with the full raw command line, generated live and copy-pasteable, for people who want every flag. Everything runs locally: no upload, no account, no server ever sees the file. I released it under GPL-3.0 rather than a permissive license, on purpose — it bundles GPL-licensed FFmpeg, so it keeps the project free for good, since anyone shipping a modified version has to release their source too.