Because we all contain multitudes, I can simultaneously accept that:
1. I hate everything about this because I vastly prefer text over video for the same content, especially AI generated video
2. There are a lot of people for whom video is their preferred medium and so this will be valuable to them.
It's a technically cool project and your cost-per-video is impressively low. Best of luck!
show comments
scosman
These AI explainers are taking over. I tried getting this working back in May. The models were okay but not quite there and it was a ton of effort. Opus 5.5 seems like the tipping point.
- Voiceovers: aligns animations to the voiceover, can generate voiceover with elevenlabs, or will transcribe and timestamp a real voiceover
- can reorder scenes both in code, and using ffmpeg for audio.
- interactive controls during authoring, can ask for micro edits or re-builds
- MP4 export/encoder
- Generates a video from a prompt (obvs)
show comments
dverlaeckt80
This is actually quite impressive from an engineer viewpoint. I just have the feeling that the videos quickly become very monotonous and rather boring due to the monotonous AI voices. If somehow you could bring dynamic variation in these videos that would be fantastic.
show comments
harvey9
Please, nobody click on the link to this hn item within hn.watch as it would be even more dangerous than typing 'google' into Google
show comments
chimneychanga
This is actually really useful to me, thanks! I often skip reading interesting articles because it's either too technical or because my eyes have had enough for the day. Listening to a summary video like this is a great solution!
bmau5
As a non-technical and oft confused reader, this is very helpful! Also a very happy Scrimba user :)
spmartin823
You should talk to the Editory guys, they did this for local news.
vbernat
This looks a good idea to let people choose their preferred medium. I am not into video either, but I turned one of my latest blog article into a video using Claude, since I thought it would be “easy.” I asked it to build the video by screencasting a browser presenting the interactive diagrams of the article and add some titles. It build some kind of recording app for me. It still took me many hours, but I think I would be faster if I redid it. I would pay to have it done faster, but I want to keep control of the text, not have a summary.
Great. Wordpress plugin would work. Get publishers to embed these videos at the top of their own articles. Allow them to tweak/fix/fine-tune them. Accept micropayments and on-demand generation. Readers can pay for better videos or "deep-dives."
This will work for young readers too, illiterates, sensory-impaired and foreigners. All four!!
mrborgen
Btw, we are hiring a new developer to join us in Oslo, Norway. We pay well and give a lot of freedom wrt working from home or at the office (hybrid solution). If getting HTML-based video generation down to 1 cent for 1 minute with 1 second delay, then please email me: per@scrimba.com.
show comments
bobajeff
I like the concept and these explainers. It sounds like this is using a HTML based format to be similar to like a Flash / Shockwave animation to keep data size down.
I wonder what the challenge would be of making these videos more interactive would be? Also I do wonder if there is any research happening in making AI explainers more trustable.
kristopolous
you know what might be interesting? The "HN 10 minute" -- 20 seconds per front page hn story as a podcast, daily.
show comments
wewewedxfgdf
I don't really see why a new programming language is needed to make explainer pages (they are not actually videos).
Seems like over engineering - why not just make JavaScript/HTML?
nonethewiser
You guys are going to hate this but next up: Each thread in a 10 second explainer and it just autoplays
show comments
george_max
Nice concept, but why not generate one video per post rather than re-generating the video for each click per user? The result is going to be the same, and it will be significantly cheaper to run.
show comments
alentodorov
loved scrimba. thanks for building that. was anout to pushback bc of the torrent of show hn sloppy pists but this one is fun.
show comments
popey
I can see vertical versions of these doing well on YT shorts or TikTok.
show comments
simbas
I'm an instructional designer, and I think this is awesome!
I'm going to be looking to reproduce this.
show comments
mlaretallack
Did not think I would like that, but really good, simple and easy summary.
mgxplyr
It's actually very good...
daok
I like it! I bookmarked it. But I wouldn't pay for it.
totallygeeky
Clicked on the demo "What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?" and immediately saw the same inadequacies I've seen in every other system like this: any attempt at visualizing a point ends up being absolute nonsense. Graphics and charts that confuse more than help, or even contradict what is being said.
It ends up being a hurdle I don't think these services can surpass, given these systems understand nothing, and have no spatial reasoning. Any of these systems that claim to help explain things visually end up being a huge liability for the learner and I would never recommend them to someone.
show comments
wewewedxfgdf
How does this capture the video?
show comments
1970-01-01
This feels like when a decent book is made into a movie, and then the movie does well so someone will take the movie and summarize the plot in a YouTube video. TLDR: this is TLDR for TLDR. Just read more from the source.
show comments
ElijahLynn
Love this! I've already used it a bunch to go through some HN posts that I might not have otherwise read.
It's definitely a form of TLDR, but for watching?!
This feels like some kind of parallel to Jev in that. If it is super fast, what other use cases may be unlocked it, as you suggest.
Also, I love the simple, easy to remember domain name, HN.watch!
show comments
Vaslo
This is great - many of us who are technical but not working in hardcore tech probably scroll by quickly on stuff we have never heard of. Getting a quick synopsis like this may drive more traffic and understanding.
Thanks!
OutOfHere
I don't see an RSS feed.
OutOfHere
How does this even reliably read the webpages, since so many of them block bots?
show comments
russellbeattie
I just tried it out - it's pretty cool. The postscript was actually noted in the generated video about this topic, which I find amusing.
I have to say, if HN were to add an AI generated paragraph summary about each link at the top of each comments page, it would probably go a long way to improving the discussions about a lot of topics. The number of people who comment based on the title of a link alone is pretty high, and I'd bet the vast majority of commenters only skim the linked pages anyways. Might as well get everyone on the same page with a quick overview.
I don't dislike that it's video (because I know people who won't read can't be "made to read" by there not being "nice enough explainer videos"), but this is the kind of stuff that bothers me in both video and text, and greatly. I don't want to rant about it here because it's not specific to your product at all, it's not even specific to LLM, the internet and especially youtube is full of stuff that neither speakers/authors nor audience seem to ever parse. And if you're just downstream of big models you probably can't really influence that. But since you are NIH enjoyers, maybe you could train your own at some point? I don't want to consume such videos, but I do want those who do to have nicer ones, because that'd be good for me, too.
j45
This is pretty cool, I'd want to see the visualizations a little different but that's a personal preference.
show comments
DANmode
Thanks, I hate it.
Kidding, I already sent it to a friend with ADHD who has been struggling to remain anchored to the tech world in any way besides Shorts.
But, culturally, I definitely hate the trend it implies!
Neat. Thank you for sharing.
show comments
eleventen
Now I want to watch the comments as a video too.
show comments
babu_mick
yo this is wild
ProofHouse
I would stick with this. There's huge potential here. I'm not going to lie, I did a video of this, and it was pretty slop. Some of it didn't even make sense and was super irrelevant. That being said, refined, there's really actually some major potential with this idea.
Because we all contain multitudes, I can simultaneously accept that:
1. I hate everything about this because I vastly prefer text over video for the same content, especially AI generated video
2. There are a lot of people for whom video is their preferred medium and so this will be valuable to them.
It's a technically cool project and your cost-per-video is impressively low. Best of luck!
These AI explainers are taking over. I tried getting this working back in May. The models were okay but not quite there and it was a ton of effort. Opus 5.5 seems like the tipping point.
I made an OSS framework for these for when you want to go beyond one-shoting it: https://github.com/scosman/videowright
- Voiceovers: aligns animations to the voiceover, can generate voiceover with elevenlabs, or will transcribe and timestamp a real voiceover
- can reorder scenes both in code, and using ffmpeg for audio.
- interactive controls during authoring, can ask for micro edits or re-builds
- MP4 export/encoder
- Generates a video from a prompt (obvs)
This is actually quite impressive from an engineer viewpoint. I just have the feeling that the videos quickly become very monotonous and rather boring due to the monotonous AI voices. If somehow you could bring dynamic variation in these videos that would be fantastic.
Please, nobody click on the link to this hn item within hn.watch as it would be even more dangerous than typing 'google' into Google
This is actually really useful to me, thanks! I often skip reading interesting articles because it's either too technical or because my eyes have had enough for the day. Listening to a summary video like this is a great solution!
As a non-technical and oft confused reader, this is very helpful! Also a very happy Scrimba user :)
You should talk to the Editory guys, they did this for local news.
This looks a good idea to let people choose their preferred medium. I am not into video either, but I turned one of my latest blog article into a video using Claude, since I thought it would be “easy.” I asked it to build the video by screencasting a browser presenting the interactive diagrams of the article and add some titles. It build some kind of recording app for me. It still took me many hours, but I think I would be faster if I redid it. I would pay to have it done faster, but I want to keep control of the text, not have a summary.
The article: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2026-spanning-tree-video
The tool built by Claude to make the video: https://github.com/vincentbernat/vincent.bernat.ch/tree/2808...
This is super cool.
Not affiliated but trymyrepo.com is very neat as well. Seems similar space.
Also I had Muse agent create a skill that can do videos. Worked pretty well. Things are getting wild.
Lastly, this might fun to those who like this space: (my thing)
https://github.com/jgbrwn/mst3k-anything
Great. Wordpress plugin would work. Get publishers to embed these videos at the top of their own articles. Allow them to tweak/fix/fine-tune them. Accept micropayments and on-demand generation. Readers can pay for better videos or "deep-dives."
This will work for young readers too, illiterates, sensory-impaired and foreigners. All four!!
Btw, we are hiring a new developer to join us in Oslo, Norway. We pay well and give a lot of freedom wrt working from home or at the office (hybrid solution). If getting HTML-based video generation down to 1 cent for 1 minute with 1 second delay, then please email me: per@scrimba.com.
I like the concept and these explainers. It sounds like this is using a HTML based format to be similar to like a Flash / Shockwave animation to keep data size down.
I wonder what the challenge would be of making these videos more interactive would be? Also I do wonder if there is any research happening in making AI explainers more trustable.
you know what might be interesting? The "HN 10 minute" -- 20 seconds per front page hn story as a podcast, daily.
I don't really see why a new programming language is needed to make explainer pages (they are not actually videos).
Seems like over engineering - why not just make JavaScript/HTML?
You guys are going to hate this but next up: Each thread in a 10 second explainer and it just autoplays
Nice concept, but why not generate one video per post rather than re-generating the video for each click per user? The result is going to be the same, and it will be significantly cheaper to run.
loved scrimba. thanks for building that. was anout to pushback bc of the torrent of show hn sloppy pists but this one is fun.
I can see vertical versions of these doing well on YT shorts or TikTok.
I'm an instructional designer, and I think this is awesome!
I'm going to be looking to reproduce this.
Did not think I would like that, but really good, simple and easy summary.
It's actually very good...
I like it! I bookmarked it. But I wouldn't pay for it.
Clicked on the demo "What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?" and immediately saw the same inadequacies I've seen in every other system like this: any attempt at visualizing a point ends up being absolute nonsense. Graphics and charts that confuse more than help, or even contradict what is being said.
It ends up being a hurdle I don't think these services can surpass, given these systems understand nothing, and have no spatial reasoning. Any of these systems that claim to help explain things visually end up being a huge liability for the learner and I would never recommend them to someone.
How does this capture the video?
This feels like when a decent book is made into a movie, and then the movie does well so someone will take the movie and summarize the plot in a YouTube video. TLDR: this is TLDR for TLDR. Just read more from the source.
Love this! I've already used it a bunch to go through some HN posts that I might not have otherwise read.
It's definitely a form of TLDR, but for watching?!
This feels like some kind of parallel to Jev in that. If it is super fast, what other use cases may be unlocked it, as you suggest.
Also, I love the simple, easy to remember domain name, HN.watch!
This is great - many of us who are technical but not working in hardcore tech probably scroll by quickly on stuff we have never heard of. Getting a quick synopsis like this may drive more traffic and understanding.
Thanks!
I don't see an RSS feed.
How does this even reliably read the webpages, since so many of them block bots?
I just tried it out - it's pretty cool. The postscript was actually noted in the generated video about this topic, which I find amusing.
I have to say, if HN were to add an AI generated paragraph summary about each link at the top of each comments page, it would probably go a long way to improving the discussions about a lot of topics. The number of people who comment based on the title of a link alone is pretty high, and I'd bet the vast majority of commenters only skim the linked pages anyways. Might as well get everyone on the same page with a quick overview.
> And finally, a real pixel-based video of the tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6rbHmBxSEs
"a compressor uses three main organs" @ 2:97
I don't dislike that it's video (because I know people who won't read can't be "made to read" by there not being "nice enough explainer videos"), but this is the kind of stuff that bothers me in both video and text, and greatly. I don't want to rant about it here because it's not specific to your product at all, it's not even specific to LLM, the internet and especially youtube is full of stuff that neither speakers/authors nor audience seem to ever parse. And if you're just downstream of big models you probably can't really influence that. But since you are NIH enjoyers, maybe you could train your own at some point? I don't want to consume such videos, but I do want those who do to have nicer ones, because that'd be good for me, too.
This is pretty cool, I'd want to see the visualizations a little different but that's a personal preference.
Thanks, I hate it.
Kidding, I already sent it to a friend with ADHD who has been struggling to remain anchored to the tech world in any way besides Shorts.
But, culturally, I definitely hate the trend it implies!
Neat. Thank you for sharing.
Now I want to watch the comments as a video too.
yo this is wild
I would stick with this. There's huge potential here. I'm not going to lie, I did a video of this, and it was pretty slop. Some of it didn't even make sense and was super irrelevant. That being said, refined, there's really actually some major potential with this idea.
This is awesome!