> Basically, denying or not seeing the practicality factor of web hosted solutions is either trying to be edgy or worryingly myopic
Are you unsatisfied with the myriad of Imagemagick, FFMPEG, sox or Ghostscript GUI front-ends ? What does a web deployment offer ? Even not taking privacy concerns in consideration, the local solution if better - I guess a one-off conversion might wish to eschew local installation, but such bread-and-butter operations are rarely one-off.
Or should we consider the market for a zip/7zip/rar/tar.gz file compression web front-end ?
> Why do such things need to be hosted at all?
because: corporate computing inmates, who cannot install anything locally
Basically, denying or not seeing the practicality factor of web hosted solutions is either trying to be edgy or worryingly myopic.