Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living

This is weird, but I make my living by digitizing old flipbooks into MP4 files!

Kiss!

OP is single-handedly keeping you in business

I see a merger in the works

Two-way merger. They can do MP4 to flipbook to MP4, as well as flip book to MP4 to flip book.

Adding some AI and they could do flipbook upscaling! Turn a 3" 50 page flipbook, to a higher resolution 8" with 500 pages for the same video.

I'd personally be worried about the two businesses just cancelling out :D

flipception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTAhvKoF948

It's the circle of life

Interesting. Back in 2007 my company Motionbox partnered with flipclips.com to sell themed flipbooks very similar to these. Both companies are defunct now. Demo at a trade show: https://youtu.be/FIiLsyeAM_I?si=BQHt5Q4Q80y3Il5f

wow!!!! true pioneer! amazing!!

There's also lenticular cards: https://gifpop.io/

Is that not very dead? I remember trying to order some gifpop stuff back in 2021/22 and they were gone by then. I see the "make your own" page on the site is broken, the blog entries are from 2017 (hover over the bottom of each one). The copyright's updated but I think that's automatic.

I only wanted a couple of images. From what I remember of gifpop, they originally did this using a machine that was intended as a wedding entertainment, guests take a moving selfie and it's printed for you, they repurposed it for selling art gifs - seemed like a great idea.

The fallback - IIRC you could buy preglued lenticular sheets in packs of 50 off amazon, and there was a site explaining how to preprocess your images (but it's not hard)...but it was going to take a bit of effort, I don't even own a printer - so I lost interest.

Oh, I think you’re right; I remember it back then and I think it did die. :(

A case of being too early? Like the grocery delivery companies that went defunct before the era of Instacart.

I still have one from a conference I went! Very awesome swag.

I uploaded a vertical video and it was a little unclear to me where the binding would be. I'm assuming it's on the left. It might be helpful to have a ui element to the side of the video container that looked like the binding so it was clear that would be the end product.

I agree - this is also an issue for me!

If they ship internationaly or to manga fans, they may want to add the option to bind on the other side

Is this just supplemental income, or are you actually making a living from it?

Isn't it a bit of a risk to tout the success of this idea among a tech crowd capable of going off and creating competitors?

It's supplemental, but it's enough to make living where we live. When I first started, I worried about creating competition by sharing too much. But after 6 years of refining production, I've realized this product isn't easy to replicate at all

It's almost always the case that anyone who thinks something is easy to replicate will realize the product is the marketing, sales, creating/building, delivery, billing, and not just any tech.

Happy for you having a family activity.

Binding is a good skill to have, remember it from my school days.

I used to think tech was a small part of a startup. Now I think it’s a _very_ small part.

Small part of successful startups.

Those that focus more on technology instead of the product often fails, unless technology is the actual startup (database companies, PaaS etc.). Even then it is often a good choice just to select something "boring" that everyone knows.

How does your product differ from the Flipbook Photobooths that people have at their weddings? They're able to create flipbooks on demand that are very high quality.

I haven’t held a flipbook like that in my hands, but the main benefit of ours is that you can upload any video from your phone anytime - you don’t need to be at a wedding. The downside, of course, is the delivery time

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Guaranteed that others have thought of this. Execution is where you succeed or fail.

It strikes me as odd that so many people think a business has to be unique to succeed. 99% of businesses do something that another business already does. For that matter, almost by definition, most businesses are not the leader in their niche. That doesn't make them unprofitable.

But what about moats??? My business guru told me I need an ironclad irreproducible moat! /s

I understand you're joking, but I guess that depends if you are trying to monopolize a market, retain first-mover advantage, etc. I guess ability to execute is itself a type of moat, perhaps especially so when the potential competition would be other startups that are statistically highly likely to fail.

Still, I wonder how many head-on competing businesses of a particular category the market can bear before they start feeling it via competitive pricing pressure, lower sales and/or slower growth, etc. What if there were 2 more video-flipbook companies, or 10 more ?

> Isn't it a bit of a risk to tout the success of this idea among a tech crowd capable of going off and creating competitors?

Yes, this feels like perfect bait for people thinking they can do it better and stuffing a video into ffmpeg shouldn’t be that hard. It’s actually starting to make me want to try it myself too.

Think the majority of the technical crowd overestimates the value of the idea, building something and actually getting and talking to customers. 99% of folks will do nothing about this.

If you're into flipbooks, check-out these 6-in-one marvels. I got the Apollo 11 collection and love it: https://flipboku.com/

holy cow that felt like magic. I'm not into flipbooks and I think I'm going to buy one just for the wow moment I just had, thank you.

How long of videos do you recommend this for? How many flips are the books good for? Any tips on keeping them in good flipping condition, in your experience?

Also, your title is missing an "a" before "living". Love the idea and execution!

probably not worth the manufacturing effort, but if you could make a book that flips on both sides, with different clips, that would potentially be novel enough to pass virality coefficients.

You'd need some radically different zig-zag binding process ... sounds like a lot of effort but might pay off.

Just to be clear I'm not saying duplex print, I'm saying flip right and flip left, same side up

Fun idea!

Building on that: there's a common children's magic trick involving a flip book that magically "colors" its pages (https://www.magicinc.net/products/fun-magic-coloring-book?va...)

It works by moving your thumb to a different position while flipping the pages -- every Xth page is cut at slightly different lengths, so when you move your thumb to the next position, different pages become visible during the flip

Using this trick you could show multiple different video clips in the flipbook just by moving your thumb to a different spot

I love that magic trick, but wouldn't that significantly thicken the cardstock flipbook ?

would it? I assume the trick is the sheets are slightly trapezoidal. Shouldn't that be enough?

Of course you're doubling the page count regardless of the approach ... that's likely unavoidable.

This sounds like a Svengali deck, which just has every other card slightly shorter. Then when you flip from one direction it seems like all of the cards are different, and from the other direction, all of the cards appear the same. Would be easy to do, but in one direction your hand would tend to block the view of the cards.

Really cool, I'd expect to see how much I would save when ordering 5, 10 etc (of the same video).

I think it's clear that groups are the winning use case, but if I want all parties from a vacation (picking one example of many) to get a flipbook, I need to pay less than $25 per.

We rarely get 3-10 identical orders, so there’s no calculator for it. For 10+, people contact us directly, and we offer custom options like branding and photo covers. But maybe we could add a page specifically for bulk orders, with some pricing adjustment visualisations. thanks for suggesting it!

Bulk orders would be great. I just sent you one of my kid starting to crawl, it'll be a birthday gift for my wife. These would make great gifts in general - if you end up doing any more personalization like names embossed on covers or something, you can probably double the price.

I love this. Hoping to retire early from my tech career someday and I have dreams of finding my own weird semi-profitable niche that I can run by just myself and my family for a few hours a day.

I currently have an incredibly small ebay business doing fairly specific motorsports vinyl emblems. The profit margin per order is great but I'm lucky to get a handful of orders a month and have no idea how to scale it. There are thousands of other people doing vinyl stuff on ebay for absolutely peanuts and I don't know how to compete with that.

Are you selling only online or are you setting up vendor booths at events?

yes, this indeed feels like a retirement! just online, because we don't actually have a booth. we have separate machines, and most of the process is manual actually.

Thanks for sharing. Whether you know it or not, your story is an inspiration.

Not wanting to pry, but are those motorsports decals paintable? There's definitely a niche there if you can do paintable graphics, I have at least 2 motorcycle tanks that I'd love graphics for. HMU @ my username at Google mail if that's a sub field you can serve.

This is great! Congrats on the relaunch and finding something tangible that can both pay the bills and work as a family business. Very cool that you were able to bring production in-house.

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, NY has, among many cool interactive exhibits about animation, a little stage and camera where you can record a short video and then go buy a flipboard version from the gift shop. They print it out and construct it right there for you (and it really does look like a pain). We’ve bought a couple and they’re really fun.

This looks pretty great, seriously considering ordering one!

The length is fixed at 72 pages/frames, but you support uploading up to 30s of video. How does this work? You sample 72 frames from a video of any length? Is there a recommended frame rate (and therefore duration) that is somehow optimal? What's the natural frame rate range of humans flipping flipbooks? So many questions!

We evenly sample 72 frames from any video length. No required frame rate, but 12-24fps works best. Most people flip at around 10fps, so short, clear-motion clips work best. When you upload your video on the order page, you'll get an accurate preview of how it'll look in hand!

It almost looks like something I could make myself, but cutting those tiny pages while keeping them perfectly indexed would surely be where my diy would go wrong. Good work OP for working out that special sauce!

It's a clever idea, and it's encouraging to see that there are still clever ideas at the small-business scale still waiting to be invented.

We’re thinking of adding a DIY version where you can buy a pattern made from your video, print it at home or a local print shop, cut it, and bind it with a clip binder. Would that be something you’d find interesting?

My kids would love that process. I’d likely only have the patience to do it once though

maybe one could die-cut sheets containing an array of cards that you first print onto and then are easily separated by hand and aligned with some sort of pegs. I once bought a type of printer paper to make business cards that comes pre scored/cut so you print it normally but then the cards come apart with a gentle pull.

Highly recommend against it! Instead of 100 customers at $10 you're cannibalizing (let's say) to 80 customers at $10 + 40 at $5. So a +20% revenue "bump", but you lose all quality control of peoples perception of your product!

Prefer: 80 customers at $12, which is approximately revenue neutral, but increases your effective ROI / hourly wage... AND you keep the high quality, word-of-mouth advertising.

Basically, you'd prefer to have people walking around with _your_ printed and bound product with nice QR code on the back rather than some hackintosh, ink-jet + scissors on 19lb copy paper and saying: "i PaId moNeY FoR ThiS!!" ;-)

...as I'm in the "home printing and binding biz" (gbc-proclick, hand/kettle stitch, carl rolling paper slicer, hp-laserjet, all for personal/hobby use)... What's the equipment you had to end up getting? I'm sorely tempted to chase a (manual) hydraulic paper cutter, but absolutely can't justify the cost / space. Are you still on color laser or are you doing something else for printing? Jigs for slicing? What's the story?

Thanks for this thoughtful perspective! Honestly, you’ve brought up a key point about quality control that we haven’t fully considered, and I completely agree. The last thing we want is our product ending up being judged unfairly due to subpar, home-printed alternatives. We’ll definitely rethink this feature and make sure any future decisions keep quality at the core.

As for the equipment, we currently use:

- 450VS/520E Electric Paper Cutter - BINDER K5 (Soft Binding Machine) - Ricoh MPC3003 (Color Laser Printer)

Thanks again for the insights!

Love it. There was a service a long time ago that used to make fun little greeting card type flipbooks (from their own content). They made great gifts, something different that were well-received by those I gifted them to. Neat behind-the-scenes details. The challenge of production with papers/printing and the whole process is real!

Sweet. The night before last christmas eve, i needed to come up with a gift quickly– and i started to write a script for this. I went down the rabbit hole of perfecting different formats, length variations etc & generate the PDFs.

Unfortunately, i failed at the physical part of this. I couldn't figure out that quickly how to print it nicely & make a usable flipbook.

So my gift ended up being a crappy mvp of a flipbook. It was appreciated, but it's embarrassing considering how many hours i've put into it, for a shitty result.

I would order, but i know, the minute i pay, i will fall down the rabbit hole again and get obsessed trying to create the physical flipbook myself. But i really don't have the time for that at the moment. When i do, i will place an order!

All the best to you!

What if you converted video essays to flipbooks, by only taking the frames that a new subtitle appeared on?

Years ago I built a service that would print family & friend Instagram and Facebook posts and automatically mail them to an incarcerated loved one. I joked that it will be technically possible to convert the videos to flip books, and here you have gone and done it!

Quick heads up, there’s a typo at “Create a uniqu flipbooke gift”.

Thanks!

They’re olde tyme flipbookes

This is awesome. I did this one time (not automated). I wanted to have an analog version of a video. It was a video of my baby daughter laughing. That was almost 10 years ago.

I used ImageMagik to make some stills. I bulk uploaded them to Walgreens photos. Thankfully they were all printed in order! I jankily bound them together somehow and it worked!

I always thought it would be neat to have this as a service. I will be ordering some of these for sure!

I studied design and visual communication. Around 2005/2006 I was doing a short animation but didn’t have a suitable way to show it when my project was being assessed. I did the same, I manually printed and trimmed each frame of animation and then blind them into a little flip book. It was such a pain to do but the lectures loved it! I can’t imagine how cumbersome it must be if you’re doing it for hundreds of orders!

I saw this on X yesterday and LOVE the idea. I'll be ordering a flip book for sure. The perfect gift for my wife!

This type of project is the best of the Hacker News community. It makes reading and dealing with all the snark worth it.

It would be nifty if, when you squeeze the spine to flip it, that it played audio from the clip and maybe an audio message.

haha! actually yes, like musical greeting cards! would be a nice experiment to try it out

I have used flipstory.com (no longer in business) in 2011 cu create 2 very nice flipbooks. It was 7,99 Euros, transport included from France to Romania. I still enjoy it, I keep it beside other family photos, as it's my months old son crawling on the floor towards the camera. Good luck!

I love the website design, it looks great!

The flip demonstration video needs to be redone. Very poor execution by the person flipping.

True, makes me question the paperstock and dimensions.

Right? It reminds me of those game ads where they intentionally fuck up in an attempt to get you riled up.

If it's too perfect, it would look fake. Perhaps make a first poor run and then another nice run, as if the person learned how to flip in the middle.

How do you bring users to your site? Is it through organic search, ads, or is it entirely word of mouth?

seo and a little bit of meta ads

Great little product! Seems like this could actually make good money with the right marketing.

Are you doing anything special to leverage TikTok or Instagram Reels? I notice you had a few sample posts. I'd go hard on that if you're not already: post yourself, hire micro influencers, etc.

Not really. I’m probably overthinking it like most developers do and holding back more than I should

A very long time ago there was a program on the Mac. You drew one picture (macdraw maybe), just lines, then a second picture. You could then watch as pix 1 morphed into pix 2. Anyone know where something like that is. A flip book for that would be great.

That is an animation technique called “tweening”. Using that term you should be able to find some software to do it.

I would start with OpenToonz: https://opentoonz.github.io/e/index.html

It’s used by Studio Ghibli for making Anime and I know for sure that it supports tweening. And it’s free and open source.

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Nicely done, what are the most popular use cases for this service? I guess weddings?

We thought weddings would be big too, but we've only had one wedding order so far haha. Most orders are gifts for various family occasions

Bizarre, my first thought was wedding also.

The flip videos on the landing page don't play on my Android 15 phone using Brave 1.74.51 on Chromium 132.0.6834.160. I can confirm they do play on my Mac while using the Brave browser, though.

I have the same browser and versions as you and it plays on my phone. Pixel 7 Pro, if that matters.

Wild. I've checked all of my settings and I have video allowed to auto-play, I tried loading it in Destkop Mode, restarting, etc., and I still get nothing.

OP, great site, btw! I'd be glad test any settings on my phone and report back, if that'd help.

Love the idea, sounds like a very fun and rewarding project. I just purchased one- I used a vertical video so I am hoping the binding is on the proper side (didn't see anything about that on the site).

It's really satisfying and inspirational to read about small businesses winning like this. Would love a blog about the daily journey in biz and tech for more of that inspo. Really awesome story.

Neat, how did you build the live preview? Green screen with numbered pages?

The live preview is literally just the uploaded video dropped to like 10fps

This is very cool, congrats on the execution!

Seems great for grandparents. Have you tested with older people with frail or arthritic hands? I'm curious how much dexterity and force is required.

The site has a weird mixture of case.

Some headings are capitalised while others aren't, doesn't seem to follow any specific reasoning -- might want to take a look at that.

How do your customers find out about your business?

seo and a little bit of meta eds. still a lot opportunities to explore

Great idea! It is cool seeing how you took this concept and made it real, end to end. I'm also considering getting a flipbook.

At the risk of sounding one of those people posting "I can do that in a weekend" ... I honestly think that not just I but almost literally anyone can cob this conversion together for themselves with Bash, FFmpeg, ImageMagick, a printer, a pair of scissors or paper guillotine, a bit of glue and a sprinkle of AI assistance so as not to have to read a shred of documentation.

I mean, the software conversion part is the easiest part. Do you have any experience with printing at scale? Printing and binding the books is probably 90% of the effort and knowledge in this business. Plus, the machinery and space alone adds up quickly. Props to the OP, this isn't an easy or quick side business to get into especially if you are printing yourselves.

But the point is that I don't need scale; just one or two personal vids and then I'm probably done with this for good.

Scale is the problem of someone who wants to convince the world that they need it done as a service.

There is scale in that hordes of people can independently pull this off. Like gluing beads to paper is being done at scale, if we consider all the kindergartens in the world as an aggregate producer.

> just one or two personal vids and then I'm probably done with this for good.

I think you're underestimating the skill involved in making the flip book.

While you may just have one or two videos to make into flip books, I strongly suspect it will take you at least 4 or 5 attempts on the 1st one to get something that isn't a pile of crap that doesn't perform as a flip book very well, and/or falls apart almost immediately.

In the long run unless you really want to go through the process of refining the process for the enjoyment of that, it would be cheaper in both time and material costs to buy from the OP.

I made a book before, out of the PDF scans of an instruction manual for some old piece of gear. It was a piece of cake. I went for a pocket format, so I printed four pages per sheet, on each size. For the spine, I used a generous bead of PVA glue, and gave the thing a cover made of boxboard.

There are other binding methods that would work okay for a flipbook, like putting rings or coils through perforations and whatnot.

Obligatory link to infamous dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

can you do this with 1hr of your time, from "i want this vid as a flip" to having it in your hand?

I don't know how literal you are being, but it is not "literally anyone". If you know what FFmpeg is, you are a very small minority of the population.

This is great! Similar to the makertool at www.fliposcope.com which is a DIY hand-cranked movie machine.

How do you actually do the manufacturing? What machines does one need to do something like this?

Looks like a Boway K5 for doing the bindings (In a photo on their about page)

Print and bind a few copies of YouTube for a serious carbon sequestration opportunity.

And limited run it. So it there are XX orders already, then the youtube video is delisted, so only exists in paper form.

Pedantic observation - maybe you could get a woman to do the flip on your splash demo video? It seems like a wedding flip book like that would be better and more aesthetically congruous if demonstrated with female hands.

You could also print double sided, in order to have a video on both sides of your “flip” - kind of a double whammy on the product for about the same amount of effort.

Nice, can't decide what meme gif to try first.

Beautiful. I love this. I hope you sell millions.

Is our video deleted after the book is created?

Yes, all videos are deleted regularly.

Can you configure the flipbook FPS?

What is your revenue? and profit?

What printers are you using?

Very clever. Love the idea.

love this post, congrats.

congrats on re-launching!

Waste of paper and ink and space, for 1 minute clip getting 60 frames and printing 60 cards to flip 60fps