Revideo (YC S23)

I’ve been somewhat quiet on Linkedin, but mainly for good reasons! Revideo (YC S23) has gotten a lot better and many more users over the last month, which is why I slightly neglected posting: ? Our framework is now downloaded more than 10,000 times per month and has more than 2.3k Github stars! ?? We’ve onboarded the first users to our hosted platform ?? We’ve been working on major new releases that will greatly improve Revideo’s developer experience and also make it much easier to build full-fledged video editors One thing that Konstantin and I have realized: building a framework that developers build entire apps upon requires much more patience than building a regular SaaS product. Beyond the technical complexity being higher, we also need to earn a lot of trust for teams to decide to build an entire product on top of infrastructure that we provide. After now more than six months of full-time building, Revideo (YC S23) is getting to a point where I can confidently say that it’s the best tool out there to build video apps, no matter whether that’s compared to other open source tools or a paid product. It’s also great that we increasingly get the same feedback from users who switch from competitors to Revideo! Given the progress we made, I want to go back to posting more to reach more developers again - you can expect many exciting updates in the upcoming weeks!

Tomorrow is the day: Konstantin and I are launching Revideo (YC S23) on Product Hunt! ?? After multiple pivots and months of iteration, it seems that we have landed on something that sticks - many builders are creating apps on top of Revideo (YC S23), others are using it to create standalone videos for their youtube channels, and even larger companies building video products are moving into production with it! We are now excited to share Revideo (YC S23) with the Product Hunt community, and we’d love to get your support. If you want to get a notification when we launch, feel free to select “Notify Me” on our Product Hunt page linked in the comments ??

Wrapped up WeAreDevelopers Congress on Friday, and I'm still buzzing with excitement! Picture this: 15,000+ people sharing ideas and talking tech across four buildings(though I’ll admit, navigating between venues sometimes felt like solving a puzzle!). My focus was to attend talks on developer experience and infrastructure. Some highlights: - "JSON and Beyond" by Douglas Crockford (still can't believe I chatted with him!) - "Location Verification without GPS?" by Mario Bodemann - "The Data Phoenix: The future of the Internet and the Open Web" by Prashanth Chandrasekar Hearing ideas in person hits differently than reading online. Loved catching up with old friends Alisdair Broshar & Edouard Bonlieu (from Koyeb ) , Tejas Kumar and Kunal Kushwaha. Met many cool new faces too. This year's spotlight on open-source was fantastic. The GitHub open-source showcase was a highlight. Had a chat with the team behind Pixi from prefix.dev , Domain Digger by Felix Wotschofsky and from the AI Tinkeres meet-up caught up with Justus Mattern who’s doing an amazing job with Revideo (YC S23) Discovered Valkey and had one of the best interactions was with Megan Knight, PMP and Katie Collins. Been using GitButler for a while now and like always good to meet the team - Scott, Megan, Mattias, Anne & Patrick. And they had one of the coolest booths! This conference reminded me why I love what I do. Our community is full of passionate, amazing people always pushing to learn and innovate. What about you? Been to any good conferences lately? Share your experiences!

In the last days, I had to prepare a launch video for Revideo (YC S23)'s upcoming Product Hunt launch. Obviously, I built this launch video using Revideo (YC S23). While our product is built for the purpose of creating apps and multiple videos programmatically, it was surprisingly fun and easy to build a rather complex, standalone video with it. Given that I'm a software engineer by trade and don't have a background in video editing, I'm pretty sure that creating this video with traditional editing software would have taken me longer than coding it with Revideo. What is also quite convenient is that I now have a bunch of pre-built animations whose code I can simply copy and paste for my next video, which is something that is not as straightforward with traditional video editing software :) The code for this video is linked in the comments. Feel free to check it out!

Last week, we had some technical breakthroughs and were able to increase Revideo (YC S23)’s rendering speeds by 70x over two releases ??? Release v0.4.3 replaced our Ffmpeg-based Video Frame Extractor with a Video Decoder built on top of the WebCodecs API, which is a low-level API for working with media elements in the browser. This resulted in a ~10-15x speedup Release v0.4.4 also replaced Ffmpeg, this time for encoding our final video. We again switched to the Webcodecs API for encoding a video stream and an mp4 muxer built with WebAssembly. Improved rendering speeds were one of the biggest requests of our users, so we’re super glad that we could deliver here! We wrote a relatively detailed blog post about implementation details that could be interesting for anyone who is interested in video processing - you can find the link to it in the comments!

We have reached 1,000 stars on Github ???? Thanks to everyone for supporting us and building with Revideo!

Today is a big day for Revideo (YC S23): We are on the front page of Hackernews! Hackernews is one of the world’s biggest forums for developers - being on the frontpage is quite a big deal if you are an open source dev tool company :) Feel free to take a look at our Show HN and to support it!

Currently, one of our highest priorities is making it easier to deploy Revideo (YC S23) apps in production. To support this, we’ve recently published comprehensive guides showing how you can render Revideo projects with Google Cloud Run! Google Cloud Run is a serverless deployment platform with autoscaling built-in. While serverless platforms are not always the best choice, it does make a lot of sense to use them for rendering videos: The task of rendering is computationally expensive compared to most common operations like simple database reads and writes, and thus, maintaining infrastructure that can handle bursts of traffic can be quite difficult. Beyond the convenience of autoscaling, Cloud Run lets us increase rendering speeds significantly: Instead of spinning up a single cloud function for rendering a single video, we can distribute rendering jobs across multiple functions. For instance, we can render a 100s video by using 20 cloud functions which render 5s of video each, thereby parallelizing our workload and massively speeding things up. We have published guides and an example project for both a simple Cloud Run deployment as well as parallelized rendering on Github - you can find these resources in our examples repository (link in the comments). If you have any questions or are running into issues, don’t hesitate to DM me :)

We woke up this morning to see that Revideo (YC S23) was featured as a top 100 open source & top 100 developer tool startup by Y Combinator! It's especially cool to share the list with amazing companies like GitLab or PostHog as well as our friends at Langfuse (YC W23) and Reworkd (YC S23). If you're interested, you can find the link to the lists in the comments. Now back to work ??

Finally: Revideo (YC S23) has a new look ? Two months ago, we launched Revideo (YC S23), our open-source framework for programmatic video editing, to the public. Since then, we’ve seen great adoption by developers building amazing projects (we’ll share some of them soon!), and up to hundreds of videos rendered per day! The progress and adoption we are seeing right now far surpasses anything we have seen for our previous products, and makes us believe that we have found a meaningful problem to solve ?? Beyond just working with hackers, we also had great conversations with companies interested in our product, which helped us better understand their needs and how to position ourselves. So far, we have seen two major trends when talking to users: ?? Marketing teams and marketing software developers are exploring how they can use Revideo to automate the creation of content with the help of AI, and to mass-produce and A/B many variations of the same content ???Many developers that are building video editing apps (e.g. for enterprise learning) struggle with doing so - building a video editor is hard! Revideo makes this a lot easier for them. Our website is linked in the comments - If you are interested in any of these use cases or would like to learn more, feel free to reach out! I'd love to learn more about your problems and am happy to provide some technical guidance :)