It's been long overdue, but Planet Grep now does the https dance (i.e., if you try to use an unencrypted connection, it will redirect you to https). Thank you letsencrypt!

I hadn't previously done this because some blogs that we carry might link to http-only images; but really, that shouldn't matter, and we can make Planet Grep itself be a https site even if some of the content is http-only.

Enjoy!

SReview, the video review and transcode tool that I originally wrote for FOSDEM 2017 but which has since been used for debconfs and minidebconfs as well, has long had a sizeable component for inspecting media files with ffprobe, and generating ffmpeg command lines to convert media files from one format to another.

This component, SReview::Video (plus a number of supporting modules), is really not tied very much to the SReview webinterface or the transcoding backend. That is, the webinterface and the transcoding backend obviously use the ffmpeg handling library, but they don't provide any services that SReview::Video could not live without. It did use the configuration API that I wrote for SReview, but disentangling that turned out to be very easy.

As I think SReview::Video is actually an easy to use, flexible API, I decided to refactor it into Media::Convert, and have just uploaded the latter to CPAN itself.

The intent is to refactor the SReview webinterface and transcoding backend so that they will also use Media::Convert instead of SReview::Video in the near future -- otherwise I would end up maintaining everything twice, and then what's the point. This hasn't happened yet, but it will soon (this shouldn't be too difficult after all).

Unfortunately Media::Convert doesn't currently install cleanly from CPAN, since I made it depend on Alien::ffmpeg which currently doesn't work (I'm in communication with the Alien::ffmpeg maintainer in order to get that resolved), so if you want to try it out you'll have to do a few steps manually.

I'll upload it to Debian soon, too.