Architecture

EncodeX is a cross-platform multimedia conversion tool built on FFmpeg, React, TypeScript, and Electron. It is intended for developers who want to understand how the pieces fit together before contributing.

Design Principles

The renderer never spawns processes and never touches the filesystem directly. All privileged operations (file dialogs, FFmpeg execution, probing, window control) live in the main process and are reached through IPC.

• Three-process separation — main, preload, and renderer, following Electron's security model (contextIsolation: true, nodeIntegration: false).
• A single abstraction over media backends — the ITranscoder interface hides whether conversion is driven through fluent-ffmpeg, a raw FFmpeg CLI child process, or the BMF framework.
• IPC as a typed contract — every channel is a constant in src/shared/ipc-channels.ts, and the renderer only ever talks to the main process through the window.electronAPI bridge exposed by the preload script.
• Shared types and constants — src/shared/ is imported by all three processes so interfaces stay in sync by construction.
• Progressive enhancement of the UI — pages are code-split with React.lazy, state lives in Zustand stores, and long-running jobs stream progress back over IPC events.

Deep Dives

The full architecture is split into focused documents:

Document	Topics
Processes, Build System & Startup	Process model (main/preload/renderer/shared), build system, binary resolution, startup sequence, CLI mode
Transcoder Abstraction & Conversion	ITranscoder interface, FfmpegCore / FFToolCore / BmfCore, shared flag building, hardware acceleration
Renderer, State & Subsystems	Render tree, pages, hooks, Zustand stores, batch queue, video player, timeline media, image processing

Additional Documentation

Document	Topics
CLI Usage	CLI usage, subcommands, all option tables
IPC Channels	IPC channels (request/send-only/events), electronAPI bridge
Testing	Test suite (123 files, 1603 tests), test setup, E2E specs
Project Structure	Full directory tree with annotations
Update Manager	In-app update manager implementation