Create an MP4 video of a web page scrolling at a steady speed | Hacker News Reader

Create an MP4 video of a web page scrolling at a steady speed

github.com

40 pointsshawnzam17 comments

This has to be intentional. I refuse to believe that someone would do this unintentionally. You are literally making video of a website, the app doesn't have any other feature, yet you don't show us the example!? What causes this? It has to be intentional, but why?

They've probably just asked their agent to create code and a readme. Adding example is too complicated for AI and doing it manually is extra work.

People are too lazy to do actual work now in the age of AI.

This isn’t even an original idea either. Claude proposed to build something similar to me when I asked him how I could present my 2500+ saved Telegram links so that I can browse them more efficiently.

If the author of this repository was proud of their craft (which they can’t be), they would want to show us “how cool it looks” in an example.

I added a demo

How does this compare to Playwwright? It got a similar feature recently [0]

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/playwright/releases/tag/v1.59.0

You could do this with ffmpeg on a screenshot PNG.

ffmpeg -i screenshot.png -vf \ "crop=iw:1080:0:n*(20000-1080)/600,format=yuv420p" \ -t 10 -r 60 output.mp4

Title of the post fails to describe what this fully does and you didn't seem to have read the repo. This generates a live interaction with the website, with scrolls, timings, clicks, route navigations, etc. A mixture of AI generated cues that you can use via skills + scripts to be feed with those cues that will process the video automatically via headless chromium and ffmpeg. Seems really interesting

What problem does this solve?

Seems pretty useful to be able to write your documentation videos as steps and generate new videos everytime the platform changes. Let’s say you have 200 videos showing how to do different things and now the UI changes.

You can either leave the videos as is (and get more confused customers) or you can spend a lot of hours recording 200 videos again. Or you can run this and get the 200 videos done in the background. Let’s say that your app is changing every month because you are early in your iteration. That is a lot of time saved every month.

Or you want to produce demo videos in multiple languages.

That’s a great usecase too.

Say you have documentation with a video showing the user how to open a page, click a button, scroll, etc. Instead of having to re-record those videos every time you update the UI you can use this library to automatically recapture it on every push.

Many websites have looping or scroll-triggered animations, or play gifs / videos that a static image wouldn't capture.

i bet you its in aid of advertising somehow

Sent you an email.

Is it possible to save the run as instructions too so you can recreate it without an LLM?

Yes, each run generates a `.cue` file.

`node src/scroll-video.mjs --script examples/wharton-faculty-demo.cue`

If the cue file does not specify out:, the MP4 is written next to the cue file with the same basename.

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