EncodeForge

A free, open-source desktop app for encoding video, generating subtitles on your own machine, and renaming media from metadata. I run a Jellyfin server, FileBot was the only tool that was genuinely good at renaming, and it stopped there. Everything else was a pile of separate CLI tools.

FileBot renames well and does nothing else. Jellyfin and Plex are both mediocre at re-encoding, compression and subtitles. The tools to do all of that properly already exist, FFmpeg and Whisper among them, but nothing free tied them together in one window.

The first version was JavaFX, picked so one codebase could go everywhere. It worked, and it was janky. Java is the language I first really got into coding with and I've grown to dislike writing it, so over a long stretch of spare time I rewrote the whole thing in Python with a PySide6 UI.

What's there now: hardware encoding through NVENC, AMF, Quick Sync and VideoToolbox, subtitles generated locally with faster-whisper so nothing gets uploaded anywhere, and renaming that pulls from eight metadata sources with a manual picker for when it guesses wrong. It'll move, copy, hardlink or symlink files into a library layout and carry the sidecars along with them.

0.5.0 is the first stable release of that rewrite, and it's worth being straight about what isn't done. The CLI can rename but can't encode yet. A few subtitle scrapers quietly break whenever the sites they scrape change. The macOS build is Apple Silicon only. Plenty left to do.