Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#1

Post by adzicg » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

Show HN: From Markdown to Video
videopuppet.com

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#2

Post by adzicg » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 1:37 PM UTC

Just completed full support for scripting videos as Markdown files using Video Puppet. Check out the post for some basic info. For more examples, see https://github.com/videopuppet/examples

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#3

Post by capableweb » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

adzicg wrote: post #2

Just completed full support for scripting videos as Markdown files using Video Puppet. Check out the post for some basic info. For more examples, see https://github.com/videopuppet/examples

It looks pretty amazing, trying it out right now.

In the meantime, could you write a bit what different pieces of technology/services you're using to build all this?

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#4

Post by grantlmiller » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

Looks cool, love the idea of using version control for video content. No mention of pricing that I could find easily.

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#5

Post by capableweb » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 2:49 PM UTC

grantlmiller wrote: post #4

Looks cool, love the idea of using version control for video content. No mention of pricing that I could find easily.

It's in the footer, https://videopuppet.com/docs/pricing/

> This application is currently in beta version. While in beta, the application is free, and allows anyone to upload assets up to 25 MB. We will announce commercial pricing later, when the full version becomes ready. For now, experiment as much as you like!

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#6

Post by adzicg » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

capableweb wrote: post #3

adzicg wrote: post #2

Just completed full support for scripting videos as Markdown files using Video Puppet. Check out the post for some basic info. For more examples, see https://github.com/videopuppet/examples

It looks pretty amazing, trying it out right now. In the meantime, could you write a bit what different pieces of technology/services you're using to build all this?

sure. the video conversion is running on AWS Fargate, with bits and pieces running on AWS Lambda. The speech synthesis is either Amazon Polly (neural voices) or Google Cloud Text to Speech (Wavenet).

Under the hood, the conversion system is using Chrome headless to generate slides, render markdown and provide syntax highlighting. Most of the video and audio processing is with FFMpeg and SOX.

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#7

Post by cochne » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

Wow, really nice! I will try using this as an extra resource for teaching my coding classes.

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#8

Post by adzicg » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

cochne wrote: post #7

Wow, really nice! I will try using this as an extra resource for teaching my coding classes.

thanks. that's one of my use cases as well, so as an extra tip, you can generate code snippets over video or images just by adding a fenced code block. eg

---

![](background.jpg)

```js

//anything here will be rendered as a slide on top of the background, with javascript highligthing

```

---

There's a full example here: https://github.com/videopuppet/examples/tree/master/slides

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#9

Post by simbas » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

I am a tech writer and I write tasks and procedures using DITA-XML. I was thinking about transforming my .dita files to .mlt to use in shortcut/melt, but I think I'm going to use this instead.

Re: Show HN: From Markdown to Video

#10

Post by slobodan_ » Sun, Mar 29, 2020, 3:12 PM UTC

VideoPuppet is excellent. I am using it to create videos for the Five Minutes Serverless Youtube channel, and so far, results are outstanding. I can create a video from the markdown file really fast.