Silly Videos

On the homepage of the Larastrap project (already mentioned many times in this blog) I've just dropped a short introduction video.

The audio track has been generated with Google Cloud Text-to-Speech - as I'm too lazy to record an actual voice track, and my spoken English is even worse than my written one - while the video part has been assembled using my most recent PHP library: Silly Videos.

Long story short: it is a parametric video builder. Given a JSON configuration, describing the behavior of the different elements (right now, texts and images) moving on the screen, it just compute each frame and reassemble them with ffmpeg. It can be considered a poor-man, self-hosted alternative to ShotStack.

Originally this library has been developed to generate automatic social media contents for another project, which every day crunches the trending Wikipedia pages for many countries, but nowadays I'm using it to build short videos of different nature as I'm exploring it for educational contents and for other walkthrough videos of my many different projects.

The list of features to be implemented is growing fast. Sooner or later, I may eventually provide a SaaS product built on top of it.