About

Who I am

I'm Alisa, and I built and maintain this site. I'm based in {OWNER_LOCATION_PLACEHOLDER} and you can reach me by email at the26thagency@outlook.com. There is no company behind this, no team, no investors — just one person who likes media tooling and writes about it.

Why I built this

For years, every time I needed to convert a video — a clip a friend sent, a screen recording, a phone export — I'd hit the same wall. The first three results on Google were online converters that wanted me to upload the file to their servers, wait, then re-download. The next three wanted me to install a desktop app. The seventh result was always the FFmpeg manual, which is brilliant but assumes you're comfortable on a command line.

FFmpeg.wasm changed what was possible. Once FFmpeg was compiled to WebAssembly, there was no longer any reason a browser couldn't do the conversion locally. So that's what this site does. Drop in a file, pick a target format, and FFmpeg runs in your browser tab against your file. Nothing uploads. Nothing waits in a queue. Nothing leaks.

The privacy philosophy

The default architecture for "free online tools" is ad-supported sites that monetize the data they collect from uploaded files. I find that arrangement gross when the file in question is a private video. The whole point of this site is that the architecture makes leaking impossible: there is no server endpoint that receives your file, so there is nothing to log, sell, or breach. The privacy policy walks through this in detail.

The trade-off is honest. Because everything runs locally, big files use your device's memory, and re-encoding is bounded by your CPU. A desktop app will always be faster for a 50GB 4K source. But for the everyday job — converting a phone clip, swapping an MKV to MP4 for a player that won't open MKV, compressing a screen recording for email — the browser is completely sufficient and dramatically more private.

The tech, briefly

The site is a Next.js 16 application deployed on Vercel. The converter is FFmpeg.wasm, the WebAssembly build of FFmpeg, loaded directly into the browser. Page styling is Tailwind v4 plus a small set of CSS modules. Analytics is Plausible — cookieless, no personal data. There is no user database because there are no users in the account sense; the site is anonymous by default.

How the blog works

The guides on this site are written by me. I write them when I run into a problem worth explaining, when a reader asks a question that deserves more than an email reply, or when an existing answer on the web is wrong or outdated. The goal is to be useful first and SEO-friendly second. If you spot an error in a post, tell me— I'd rather fix it than leave it sitting wrong on the internet.

Get in touch

For feature requests, bug reports, corrections, or just to say the tool worked for something it had no business working for — email the26thagency@outlook.com. I read every message and reply to most within a few days. There is also a contact page with a simple message form if you prefer.