alt Hacker NewsI did this a few years ago. The approach these guys are taking is kinda hacky compared to other better ways - and I've tried most of them.
It works but only in a limited way there's lots of problems and caveats that come up.
I dropped it in the end partly because of all the problems and edge cases, partly because its a solution looking for a problem an AI essentially wipes out any demand for generating video in browsers.
I ended up writing code that modified chromium and grabbed the frames directly from deep in the heartof the rendering system.
It was a big technical challenge and a lot of fun but as I say, fairly pointless.
And there are other solutions that are arguably better - like recording video with OBS / the GPU nvenc engine / with a hardware video capture dongle and there's other ways too that are purely software in Linux that work extremely well.
You can see some of the results I got from my work here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tac2EvogjE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwqMdi-oMoo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GXts_yNl6s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzFngReJ4ZI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA6VWZcDANk
In the end if you want to capture browser video - use OBS or ffmpeg with nvenc or something - all the fancy footwork isn’t needed.
Replies
> I dropped it in the end partly because of all the problems and edge cases, partly because its a solution looking for a problem an AI essentially wipes out any demand for generating video in browsers.
That is only because your view omits some other problems this solves/products this enables.
There is an incredible ecosystem of tools out the browser land, to create animation.
If you can capture frames from the browser you can render these animations as videos, with motion blur (render 2500 frame for a second of video, blend 100 frames each with a shutter function) to get 25fps with 100 motion blur samples (a number AfterEffects can't do, e.g).
"Use OBS" is one approach that definitely works. If you run the browser inside OBS it also disables hardware acceleration, which may cause some issues but has the advantage of turning DRM support off.
Here you go, capture browser video for $100……
https://www.amazon.com.au/AVerMedia-Streaming-Passthrough-Re...
Or use ffmpeg with nvenc it allows simultaneous capture of 12 sessions.
Toss away all the hard work futzing with the browser just put in one ffmpeg command.
Using OBS won't make your sluggish animation seem buttery smooth though. This seems to be the point of replit's attempt here. Perfect frame pacing.
On top you could use that technique to record at frame-rates higher than native. There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to redraw a basic page with some animations at a few hundred fps.