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Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living

videotoflip.com

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Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living

#1

Post by momciloo »

I built this product back in 2018 as a small side project: a tool that turns short videos into physical flipbooks. After launching it, I didn't touch it for years. Life and work took over, and it sat idle. But it kept getting a few orders every month, which made it impossible to forget. So in December 2024, I decided to rebrand and revive it.

The initial version relied on various local printing offices. I kept switching from one to another, but the results were never quite right. Either the quality wasn't good enough, or the turnaround times were too long. Eventually, me and my wife bought all the necessary machines and moved production in-house.

Now, it's a family business. My wife and I handle everything: printing, binding, cutting, addressing, and shipping each flipbook. On the technical side, it’s powered by Next.js, with FFmpeg extracting frames and handling overlays, and ImageMagick used for adding trim marks and creating the final PDFs.

After many years of working in IT, working on something tangible feels refreshing. It's satisfying to create something that brings people joy. And that is not hard to sell (like dev tools, for example haha). There are still challenges: we're experimenting with different cover papers, improving production, and testing new ideas without making things confusing. But that’s part of what keeps us moving forward.

Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living
videotoflip.com

Re: Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living

#2

Post by ChrisArchitect »

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!

Re: Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living

#6

Post by AntiEgo »

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.

Re: Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living

#8

Post by kristopolous »

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

Re: Show HN: I convert videos to printed flipbooks for living

#10

Post by gizajob »

gizajob wrote: post #7

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.
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