🏭 TransCoda for Windows 🎬

Fast, tiny, fully native media conversion for Windows 11. ⚡

TransCoda converts video and audio files with FFmpeg behind a clean, native WinUI 3 interface. No Electron, no web runtime, no bundled browser — it looks, feels, and performs like it belongs on your PC: Mica backdrop, Fluent controls, dark/light theme awareness, drag & drop straight from File Explorer. 🪟✨

🔍 Looking for the macOS app? See TransCoda4Mac — an independent repository with the same architecture built natively on SwiftUI.

🧠 Why native?

A media converter spends its resources on one thing: encoding. The UI should cost almost nothing. Design goals, in order:

1. 📦 Minimal footprint. Idle RAM in the tens of megabytes, near-zero idle CPU, small binary. Every resource the app doesn't use is a resource FFmpeg can.
2. 🎨 Platform integration. Follows the Windows 11 design language (Fluent, Mica) instead of shipping a lowest-common-denominator UI.
3. 🔧 Simple, honest engine. The app is a thin native shell around FFmpeg. You can read the exact command each conversion runs.

✨ Features

• 📋 Batch conversion queue with per-file progress, cancel, and reveal in File Explorer.
• 🎞️ Video containers: MP4, MKV, MOV, WebM.
• 🎥 Video codecs: H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, AV1, VP9.
• 🎵 Audio-only output: M4A (AAC), MP3, FLAC, Opus, WAV.
• 🎚️ Quality control with a CRF-style slider, resolution limiting, audio bitrate selection.
• 🚀 Hardware-accelerated encoding, auto-detected from the local FFmpeg build: NVIDIA NVENC, Intel Quick Sync, AMD AMF — picked in that order per codec.
• 📊 Accurate progress from FFmpeg's machine-readable -progress stream.
• 📁 Output next to the source file or to a folder you choose; never overwrites existing files.

⚙️ How it works

┌─────────────────────────────┐
│  WinUI 3 (Mica, Fluent)     │  queue list, drag & drop, settings pane
├─────────────────────────────┤
│  JobQueue                   │  ordered processing, one encode at a time
│  FfmpegCommandBuilder       │  settings → argument list (no shell involved)
│  TranscodeEngine            │  spawns ffmpeg, parses -progress, cancellation
│  HardwareCapabilities       │  parses `ffmpeg -encoders` once at startup
│  Ffprobe                    │  duration probe for progress percentage
│  FfmpegLocator              │  app folder → known paths → PATH
└─────────────────────────────┘
            │
            ▼
        ffmpeg.exe / ffprobe.exe  (external processes)

FFmpeg binaries are not committed to this repository. The app looks for them in this order: next to TransCoda.exe (or in an ffmpeg\ subfolder), C:\ffmpeg\bin, then PATH.

📥 Getting FFmpeg

winget install Gyan.FFmpeg

or download a build from gyan.dev and drop ffmpeg.exe and ffprobe.exe next to TransCoda.exe. AV1 software encoding uses libsvtav1, included in the standard Gyan.dev build.

🔨 Building

Requirements: Windows 11 (or Windows 10 19041+), Visual Studio 2022 with the .NET desktop development and Windows App SDK workloads — or just the .NET 8 SDK on the command line.

dotnet build TransCoda.sln

Or open TransCoda.sln in Visual Studio and press F5. The app runs unpackaged (WindowsPackageType=None) with the Windows App SDK self-contained, so no MSIX deployment step is needed during development.

📂 Project layout

TransCoda.sln
TransCoda/
  App.xaml(.cs)        app entry point
  MainWindow.xaml(.cs) queue window, settings pane, drag & drop
  Models/              formats, codecs, settings, job model
  Core/                locator, prober, command builder, engine, queue

🗺️ Roadmap

• 💾 Presets (save/load named conversion profiles)
• 📝 Subtitle pass-through and burn-in
• 🌈 HDR metadata pass-through
• ✂️ Trim / clip range selection
• 📦 Signed MSIX releases

🤝 Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. This project follows the Contributor Covenant code of conduct and uses Conventional Commits.