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Warning over free online file converters that actually install malware
(www.malwarebytes.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Cybersecurity
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What are you trying to convert? Generally shoving "open source software" on the end of the search query will get you something legit
I figured it would just be good to get a list of safe options going, since the post is about unsafe options
Fair play!
If you need to convert audio or video, ffmpeg is your man
If you need to convert a document pandoc is what you need
If you need to convert an image, imagemagick
If you need to "convert" some online media into local media, yt-dlp
Can't think of another use case that people would regularly be converting off the top of my head, but happy to fill in any gaps if there are any
Convert image to text (OCR) tesseract.
In this case the advantage is that you don't need to download anything, and I'll admit that I used websites like this years ago
For example, PNG to ICO, or PDF to Word, when people don't have a tool installed and they look up how to do it, these websites pop up and it feels very convenient.
Maybe there is a utility that can be self hosted for this. Something like StirlingPDF but for all kinds of files
https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF
+1 for StirlingPDF, amazing tool. I use Handbrake for video conversion and Gimp for images. IT-tools for text based conversions, but it does many other things too and can be self hosted.