EncodeForge

A free, open-source desktop app for video encoding, AI subtitle generation and smart media renaming, built to run a Jellyfin server properly. FileBot handled renaming and nothing else, and Jellyfin and Plex are both mediocre at the rest — so EncodeForge puts encoding, compression and subtitles behind one local UI instead of a pile of separate CLI tools.

I run a Jellyfin server. FileBot was the one tool that was actually good at renaming, but it stopped there — it did not touch re-encoding, compression or subtitles, and Jellyfin and Plex are both mediocre at handling that themselves. The tools to do it properly existed — FFmpeg, Whisper-based subtitle generation, and so on — but nothing tied them together in one place for free.

The first version was JavaFX, chosen so one codebase could ship to every platform. It worked, but it was buggy and janky, and — even though Java is the language I first really got into coding with — I have grown to dislike working in it. So over a long stretch of spare time, I rewrote it from scratch in Python with a PySide6 UI, fixing a long list of bugs along the way.

What is there now: hardware-accelerated encoding through NVENC, AMF, Quick Sync and VideoToolbox, subtitle generation that runs fully local via faster-whisper, and metadata-driven renaming pulling from eight sources — GUI and CLI sharing one core, so a batch job is the same code path as a button click. Version 0.5.0 is the first stable release of that rewrite. It still has a long way to go, and I have a lot more planned for it.