Most "convert your video" sites work the same way: you upload a file, a server somewhere does the work, and you download the result. TrackPeel doesn't do that — everything runs in your browser tab using a version of FFmpeg compiled to run client-side. Your file never leaves your machine.
Why that's the harder path
It would genuinely have been easier to build a small upload-and-process backend. Server-side FFmpeg is mature, well-documented, and doesn't have to fight browser memory limits or wait on WebAssembly startup time. Running the conversion locally instead means:
- Larger files are more likely to hit browser memory ceilings than they would on a server (this is the honest reason there's currently a soft file-size limit, and why a desktop companion app — with no such ceiling — is in the works)
- We can't add server-side features like cloud storage of your converted files, batch history across devices, or account syncing, because there's no account and no server storing anything
- Debugging is harder, since every user's browser and hardware is a slightly different environment instead of one controlled server
Why we think it's worth it anyway
A gameplay clip is, by definition, footage of you playing — sometimes with voice chat, sometimes with a webcam overlay, sometimes just embarrassing menu-screen fumbling before the good part starts. None of that is sensitive in a legal sense, but there's still something uncomfortable about a "free online converter" quietly routing your files through a server you can't see, for a task that a browser is now genuinely capable of doing on its own.
Local processing also just tends to be faster for the common case: no upload wait, no download wait — the browser reads the file directly off your disk and writes the result back to it.
The trade-off, plainly
This isn't a claim that local-first is always better — for genuinely huge files or workflows that need cloud storage, a server-based tool is the right call, and that's honestly part of why a desktop app is next on the roadmap rather than a backend. For the specific job this site does — pull the audio, rebuild the video, hand you both files back — running it locally felt like the right default rather than the convenient one.