Why I built it

If you've ever posted a video to your WhatsApp Status, you've probably noticed it comes out blurry and blocky — even if the original was sharp. That's because WhatsApp re-compresses every video you post to Status, and its encoder is aggressive.

I wanted a way to post genuinely HD videos to Status, so I built StatusDrop / WAstatus: you upload/edit a clip in the browser, it compresses the video to match WhatsApp's exact Status encoding spec (so WhatsApp's own re-encode becomes near-lossless), auto-splits long videos into parts that fit WhatsApp's limits, and delivers the finished clips to your WhatsApp — you just forward them to your Status.

Just open-sourced it under AGPL-3.0.

Repo: https://github.com/Shamanthnp1/WAstatus

What's inside

In-browser video editor (vanilla JS) + Node/Express backend

ffmpeg encode/split pipeline tuned to WhatsApp's Status spec

Cloudflare R2 (S3-compatible) storage + a Cloudflare Worker for uploads

Docker on Azure App Service, GitHub Actions CI/CD → GHCR

WhatsApp delivery via Baileys (multi-device)

181 tests including property-based tests (fast-check)

Multi-language frontend (en / es / hi / pt)

The interesting engineering

The core trick is that quality survival depends on two things: (1) pre-encoding the file to WhatsApp's Status target (resolution, bitrate ceiling, GOP, faststart, H.264 profile) so the re-encode barely changes it, and (2) how the file reaches the phone. A file delivered as a native WhatsApp message and then forwarded to Status is reused as-is; a file saved to the gallery and reposted gets re-compressed harder.

There was also a lot of reliability work: request timeouts on every network op, self-healing for stuck jobs, orphaned-storage cleanup, single-instance session handling, and reconnect backoff.

The honest limitation — and why not the official API

This is the part I want to be transparent about, because it's the whole tradeoff of the project.

Delivery uses Baileys, an unofficial WhatsApp integration. WhatsApp periodically bans numbers used for automation — a known constraint for this entire category of tools.

The obvious question is: why not use Meta's official WhatsApp Cloud API instead? I tried, and here's the catch:

The official Cloud API routes media through Meta's Business pipeline, which re-encodes the video. So the file is already degraded before it even reaches the user — and then WhatsApp's Status re-encode hits it again. The result is visibly softer. That defeats the entire purpose of an HD tool.

Baileys sends the file as a native, byte-preserved WhatsApp media message. When the user forwards that to Status, WhatsApp reuses the already-optimized file, so the HD survives.

So it's a genuine fork: official API = no bans but lower quality; Baileys = HD quality but ban risk. Since quality is the entire point, I chose Baileys and built the system around fast recovery when a number gets flagged. It's the same tradeoff every tool in this space faces — most competitors that use the official API quietly accept the lower quality.

The code and architecture are what I'm really sharing here — not asking anyone to run the live automation.

Feedback welcome

I'm a solo developer and would genuinely appreciate code review, architecture feedback, or contributions. Happy to answer anything.

Btw now i have closed website service and moved to Application service but still everything is Open souce and free

Hey everyone,

I made YtToPdf, a native macOS app that takes a YouTube link and gives you a clean, readable transcript you can export as a PDF, TXT, Markdown or SRT.

GitHub: https://github.com/MarinoBaric/YtToPdf

**How it works**

- Uses the video's own captions when they exist (manual first, auto second) and cleans them up into real sentences and paragraphs. No more repeated rolling-caption fragments or [Music] tags.

- If a video has no captions, it downloads just the audio and transcribes it locally with whisper.cpp.

- Everything runs on your Mac. No account, no analytics, no API keys, no subscription.

**Things I'm proud of**

- PDF export with an editorial layout, clickable timestamps and page headers.

- A "Speech Fingerprint" on every PDF: a pattern generated from when words are spoken across the video, so no two documents look the same.

- Searchable history, so you can reopen old transcripts instantly.

**Tech:** Swift 6, SwiftUI with Liquid Glass, SwiftData, Core Text for the PDF layout, plus yt-dlp, FFmpeg and whisper.cpp under the hood.

Heads up: it's source-only for now (not notarized), so you build it yourself with Xcode. It needs macOS 27 and an Apple silicon Mac. There's an install script that makes it pretty quick.

**I'd really like your feedback:**

- Would you actually use something like this? What for?

- Anything you'd add or change, in the app or the PDF design?

- Is building from source a dealbreaker, or is it fine for a tool like this?

MIT licensed, issues and PRs welcome. Thanks for checking it out!

​

Hi everyone!

I'm working on an early-stage project that will need movie and TV-show subtitles, and I'm researching reliable sources before moving forward.

I'm looking for free subtitle sources or APIs that developers can use, ideally with:

\- A large collection of movie and TV-show subtitles across multiple languages.

\- Search by movie title, year, or IMDb/TMDB ID.

\- API access, if available.

\- Clear terms that permit use within an app.

\- Free usage limits suitable for a small project.

I'm not looking to bypass restrictions or misuse anyone's service. I want to understand which sources are genuinely available for permitted use.

Which sources or APIs would you recommend, and are there any licensing restrictions developers should know about?

Thanks for your help!

How can I contribute to open source projects when I don't fully trust the code in the project? Are there standard approaches? Do people usually just download the project to their local laptops?

Oryx is a (very) fast, keyboard-first Markdown editor and reader. It also edits code and opens EPUB ebooks and CBZ comics.

Instead of relying on webviews, Oryx uses a custom vector rendering pipeline: so now browser and no electron. It draws typography, code highlighting, and math directly to the screen. The workflow is modal and built for keyboard-driven navigation. It stays fast and lightweight on memory, even with heavy files. It doesn't rely on GPU acceleration and is optimized to run smoothly on virtually any (older) hardware.

Version 1.2.1 brings tighter rendering passes, stability fixes, and small UI polishes based on community feedback. On the roadmap for v1.3.0 focus mode, multi-pdf export and more stability on big files.

Please share your comments and if you find Oryx useful, please star it on GitHub so it can reach other. Thanks!

Code & Downloads: GitHub: https://github.com/wmahfoudh/oryx
Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/wmahfoudh/oryxOryx

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Sharing a file or a local project should take one command, not an upload and a sign-up.

That idea is what led me to build vrok, a free and open source command line tool that turns a file, a folder or a local development server into a temporary public link.

The problem

Sending a large video or a folder of files usually means waiting for an upload, hitting a size limit, and leaving a copy on someone else's server. Showing a teammate an app running on localhost usually means creating an account with a tunnelling service and configuring an auth token first.

How vrok works

You run a single command, such as vrok video.mp4, vrok photos or vrok localhost:3000, and you get a public HTTPS link that is copied to your clipboard.

Nothing is uploaded. The recipient downloads directly from your machine, and the link stops working as soon as you stop sharing it. The person on the other end does not need to install anything. They simply open the link in a browser.

What it offers

No account, no configuration and no file size limit.

Password protection, expiring links and one time download links.

In browser previews for video, images and PDFs, and full folders downloadable as a single zip.

Resumable downloads with a SHA-256 checksum for verification.

Local development servers shared with hot reload still working.

Support for macOS, Linux, Windows and FreeBSD.

Where it fits

vrok is a lightweight alternative to tools like ngrok and localtunnel for sharing a local app, and to services like WeTransfer and Google Drive for sending large files. It is designed for the everyday moment of "take a look at this", not for permanent hosting.

The project is MIT licensed and available on GitHub. I would genuinely value feedback from anyone who tries it, especially on what would make it part of your daily workflow.

Website: https://alijabbar034.github.io/vrok/

Source code: https://github.com/AliJabbar034/vrok

On win11 i tried KeepAwake but the issue is it interferes with other connected bluetooth audio devices bcz how it works it sends a very high frequency (non audible to human) sine wave to all bluetooth audio devices , but i only want to send that to a specific devices which i can't do in KeepAwake , also i didn't found anything for Linux(gnome). I would prefer a gui app rather than dealing with the terminal.

I like Zoxide too much that I missed it in the file manager. So I wrote a Nemo extension to allow changing location querying Zoxide.

When you select a location in the dialog its score is incremented, but there is no way, for now, to reach new locations: you must add them via Zoxide itself. So I was thinking to display, after Zoxide results, the results of fd, but I am still pondering over it.

https://gitlab.com/DPDmancul/nemo-zoxide

Hi, I'm new to Dragora GNU/Linux-libre. Could someone explain how to install text editors like Emacs or Vis, or browsers like IceCat?

I switch from Microsoftoffice to Libreoffice and I am generally happy with it but Libreoffice Impress does not have collapsible sections/chapters, you can make named sections but they cannot be collapse.

I have looked into other popular free options like Google slides, softmaker freeoffice presentations and Apache OpenOffice Impress but they don't have the feature of the collapsible sections. I am trying to move away from Microsoft so I don't want to use the online version of PowerPoint.

I am currently using WPS Presentation even though I don't want to. It works surprisingly nice, Similar to PowerPoint it has collapsible sections but it tries to keep pushing you to buy a WPS Cloud subscription, constantly tries to run in the background whenever Iam using libreoffice and even when I use different applications to open certain file types. I have tried to turn off file type detection and Cloud Service but it continues doing it.

If anyone knows any alternatives please do tell!!

(or how to make wps feel less like malware)

Hey r/freesoftware 👋

Sharing a new open-source project a friend built called InkDoc.

It is a cross-platform desktop tool (and local REST API) designed to convert messy everyday documents into clean Markdown entirely offline, without third-party cloud services or telemetry.

The repo is MIT licensed:

https://github.com/AbdoslamB/InkDoc

Why he built it:

Most online converters want you to upload sensitive files to their servers, while lightweight CLI scripts often completely mangle tables, multi-column layouts, and scanned pages.

How it is put together:

- Microsoft MarkItDown handles Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and HTML.

- IBM Docling handles complex PDFs (reading order layout analysis, OCR, and table extraction).

- Markit handles EPUBs, Jupyter notebooks, and similar formats.

- Everything runs on your own hardware (Windows, macOS, Linux).

- Includes both a drag-and-drop desktop UI and a headless mode with a localhost REST API for scripting.

It just hit v1.1.0. He is actively looking for community feedback on edge-case files, performance bottlenecks, and general feature requests.

Contributions and issues are welcome on GitHub, or feel free to leave your thoughts here!

Hi community. It's been now a bit more than 2 years since I started to work on this "project management project", with many ideas and with a good vision of how to improve and be better than certain bespoke commercial tooling out there. I am happy to announce version v1.6.7 with a lot of polished aspects and new features that make it a joy to use (even if I say so myself)

LucidPlan is a simple, hackable, free and open source project management software that you can easily self-host, you only need something that runs Guile Scheme and a SQLite database. (Guix is recommended, not mandatory)

I spent years using things like Jira, Trello, Asana, GitHub projects and eventually became frustrated with how much complexity gets piled onto what should essentially be:

projects → tickets → priorities → workflow → done

I decided to build my own as a challenge, but also to create something blazingly fast and simple, that people can quickly learn (even applicable to non-tech projects). Also I aimed for ease of self-hosting, no SPA frameworks and no dependency on proprietary clouds or software.

LucidPlan is licensed under the GNU AGPLv3 or later. Source code:

https://codeberg.org/jjba23/lucidplan

You can also look at my running instance:

https://lucidplan.jointhefreeworld.org/

The project leverages the power of Lisp (Guile Scheme) by using SXML for front-end aspects, clean controllers with Artanis and a powerful repository pattern abstraction.

What does it do?

• Manages your project backlogs with ticket priorities
• Native drag-and-drop ticket reordering (priority)
• Kanban boards with drag-and-drop status changes
• Global/project search (still more work to be done)
• Users, assignees and fine-grained permissions
• Light/dark mode
• Keyboard-accessible ticket and project lists
• Org-mode syntax in ticket titles and descriptions
• Org links and rich Org content rendered to HTML
• Hackable/customizable with Scheme
• Lightweight, and mobile-friendly
• SQLite backend
• Lightweight vanilla JavaScript on the frontend for some interactive enhancements

The Org-mode integration is particularly fun: you can write ticket descriptions using Org syntax and LucidPlan renders the result as HTML.

For example, your ticket can contain things like:

* Investigate weird bug

The problem seems to happen when [[https://example.org][this thing]] is enabled.

- Check configuration
- Reproduce the problem
- Fix it

…and LucidPlan renders that into the ticket as pretty styled HTML. (see orgwebalchemy post: https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/1wox8h4/parsing_org_mode_with_parsing_expression_grammars/ ).

There is still plenty to improve, and I'd genuinely love feedback from people who actually use project-management software daily. I think you'll find LucidPlan as a refreshing take.

Especially interested in hearing from the community:

• What do you hate about existing project-management tools?
• What features do you consider essential?
• Would you use a Lisp/Guile-based project-management system?
• What would make LucidPlan useful for your own projects? What killer feature can I work next?

Happy hacking :-)

A mainly Anime downloader for various websites and language options:
https://github.com/NINJAMINEBRO/Aniloader_public/blob/main/Supported_Websites_Languages.md
Completely free and open source under Apache 2.0 License
It is a full rework of the previous version "Aniworld Downloader"

Open Source: https://github.com/NINJAMINEBRO/Aniloader_public/tree/main
Download: https://ninjaminebro.itch.io/aniloader

6 years on Reddit, zero posts, all lurking. Figured if anything was worth breaking that streak, it's this.

So this started because Google kept nagging me about storage. Every single week. And I did the math on paying for Google One forever and just got annoyed.

Those are MY photos. Why am I paying rent on my own memories?

Anyway, I had a spare ARM board lying around (the cheap 4-core / 8GB kind) and a long weekend, so I went for it.

It's been running for a bit now and honestly... it's great.

Photos auto-upload from my phone, there's a timeline, a map view, sharing links for family. Everything I actually used Google Photos for.

What I'm running

Nextcloud — their Android app is the main reason; auto-upload just works.

Nginx instead of Apache — because this board has 8GB of RAM and I'm not made of memory.

PostgreSQL over MariaDB — Nextcloud recommends it, and file locking is less cursed.

Redis + APCu for caching.

128GB USB drive for the actual data. Do NOT use the SD card for this. SD cards die fast under DB + thumbnail writes.

Cloudflare Tunnel for remote access/HTTPS. No ports open on my router, my home IP isn't floating around. Done.

Things that bit me, so they don't bite you

1. Fresh Ubuntu boot + apt = dpkg lock held hostage.

Just wait a few minutes. Don't panic like I did.

1. CHECK the PHP version compatibility with Nextcloud before you install anything.

My distro shipped PHP 8.5, which works. Older distros will make you suffer with PPAs.

1. Put nofail in fstab for the USB drive.

Otherwise, the board won't boot if the drive is unplugged.

Ask me how I know.

1. PHP tuning: copy the ini to cli/conf.d as well, not just FPM.

occ was behaving completely differently from the web app, and it took me way too long to figure out why.

1. Thumbnails are HEAVY on little boards.

Run Preview Generator from cron at night, or the first time you open your gallery you'll think it's broken.

Real talk on performance

For 1–3 people, it's totally fine.

The web UI is snappy once you get OPcache + Redis sorted, and phone uploads on LAN are basically instant.

You won't get Google's face recognition magic (there are apps for it, but they're slow on ARM). For me, that's a fine trade.

My photos. My hardware. ~5 watts of electricity. No monthly email from Google.

I wrote up the whole thing with all the configs and a script that does the install for you, if anyone wants it:

https://clinerds.com/article/self-host-nextcloud-google-photos-alternative

Be gentle on my first post lol. Happy to answer questions.

I’m working on a large, new GPL project and I’m loving life! Apart from the fact that even I publish my hours of work, some scraper is just going to read all the code, bung it in a model and paste it into some vibe coders corporate repo with the copyright magically stripped.

Now I’m a true GPL believer… so I’m not against people (or machines) copying my work. I’m against the stripping of copyright. So can I alter the definition of what a derivative work is to include maybe an LLM trained on the codebase or the code generated by an LLM trained on the codebase? Or is that an additional restriction?

Hello everyone! TilBuci (https://tilbuci.com.br), the content creation tool I've been developing reached version 25! In this release, the Showtime feature gains new capabilities through the "Showtime for Makers" platform. Now, in addition to desktop and Android app versions, you can export your creations to run on custom hardware, such as prototyping boards. This version creates a dedicated Wi-Fi network that broadcasts your content to nearby devices—no app installation or Internet connection required. To explore this feature, I’ve prepared a video tutorial demonstrating how to use TilBuci to create a companion app for a board game. Check it out here:

https://youtu.be/Nyia_E_WHUY

TilBuci is free software, licensed under the MPL-2.0. The tool repositor can be found here:

https://github.com/lucasjunqueira-var/tilbuci

What free tool do you use to take screenshots and get an instant shareable link?

Hello everyone!

I'm new to the community, and first of all, I'd like to say hello to everyone!

After spending a year as a DevOps engineer at a traditional company. The feeling that I want my work to make a meaningful difference has taken hold of me, and now I’m looking for a community where I can contribute as an intern, doing whatever it takes to be helpfu. The thing is, I can’t seem to find many options.

Does anyone know of any initiatives or communities they’d like to share? If not, could someone share some tips on how to find communities or initiatives?

Thanks in advance. Best regards

I would like to share a project I have been working on called Alenia Nerve.

This project started from a personal need: I wanted two applications on my PC to communicate and transfer data automatically. To achieve this, I developed a .nrv container format that allows packaging and password-protecting files.

Later, I faced another challenge: I use [Windows]() and [Linux]() on different machines, and transferring large files between them was cumbersome. Uploading to the cloud or using USB drives was inconvenient for big files.

That’s why I developed the LAN functionality in Nerve, which enables direct file transfers between devices on the same local network without requiring Internet access. Currently, the software supports Windows, Linux, [macOS](), and [Android]() (via [Termux]()).

Key features include:

• Packaging and protecting files and directories with the .nrv format.
• Streaming transfers to avoid loading entire large files into memory.
• Integrity verification to ensure data is not corrupted.
• Upcoming features like resumable transfers, deduplication, and improved recovery mechanisms to make large transfers more reliable.

The goal is not to build another cloud storage service but to enable simple, direct, and secure data transfers between my own devices when they are on the same network.

The project is free and open-source, available on [GitHub]() for anyone interested in trying it, contributing, or adapting it:

I welcome any feedback or suggestions to improve the project.

​I am primarily looking for software that allows me to perform photo manipulation similar to what is shown in the two attached videos. I have basic knowledge of GIMP, Paint.NET, and Krita. What would you recommend?

https://youtu.be/UD_BqknfhME?si=k9itXnGhcFFfuYUM

https://youtu.be/6aoC6IF87f4?si=mzsv1IK682fF-mfx