I feel sick saying it, but I think this is a project you could complete with AI. It sucks ass at understanding complex problems, but it’s good at cranking out small scripts to integrate tools together.

You basically just want a wrapper around ffmpeg with a light web interface to handle upload, script execution, and download.

LLMs are pretty good at spitting out a simple web interface that runs in a barebones server like Express or nginx.

If you don’t need to worry about security or accessibility or any “not on the critical path” concerns, this could probably work after a few iterations.

As for anything already out there - I’ve never come across anything. The closest app I can think of is TDARR which is intended to automatically transcode your media library to h265. That wraps up some of the ffmpeg stuff you want, but doesn’t address the upload/download half of the workflow.

And that ocean is preferably on a planet other than Earth.

OH MY GOD I SAW A TIT

This happened to me once and I completely overthought it.

In my case, I removed the PCB from the drive and took a close look and saw a single scorched IC that I figured was the problem. I think it was a voltage regulator or something like that.

So I bought a scrap drive and tried to transplant the PCB onto my dead drive, but of course that wouldn’t be able to read my old data.

So took it into a local electronics repair shop and asked if he’d be able to make it work.

He took one look at the damaged PCB, pushed the scrap one back at me and said “yeah I’ll just replace this part.”

40 bucks later I had a working drive again and was able to rescue the data.