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Which would be fine if we were running our node app on one of our servers, however since your Electron app needs to work on your end user's machine you cannot make this assumption. This program can be used in your node projects using the fluent-ffmpeg node package, this package however assumes the user has FFMPEG installed on our machine. Get our dependenciesįFMPEG is a mature open source shell program for Unix and Windows that has been around for a long time that is widely used for manipulating and converting multimedia files. What we will be doing here is packaging the binaries for FFMPEG with our application and interfacing with that binary using the main process. The Node process here is refered to as the 'main' process and the Chromium browser views and 'renderer' these process can message over IPC messages in a send/response pattern you can think of like HTTP or TCP. A main cause for its popularity is its ability to allow developers to transfer their web development skills over to building desktop applications that as a bonus often package Linux, Windows and Mac installers from the same code base.Įlectron does that by packaging the HTML, CSS and Javascript files for the project with a version of Chromium and optionally a copy of Node JS for some heavy lifting or to use the the interfaces Electron can access.
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Electron is a tool maintained by the GitHub team that allows developers to build desktop apps exclusively using web technologies which powers many popular desktop applications today including VScode, Atom, Slack, Discord and many others.
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