Spent months building this video generation API... Looking for feedback
Hi,
I have spent a few months building this in my free time and would love your feedback.
It's a video generation API. It's not really something revolutionary but it can do some cool things so hear me out.
My idea was this:
Make an API that will be able to generate simple videos from JSON at scale, and cost-effectively.
Quite a challenge but I could not resist.
What it currently supports:
- Drawing text
- Drawing rectangles
- Drawing images
- Audio
- Video
- Simple animated transitions for properties like dimensions, position, colors, and almost all numerical properties of elements.
- MP4 & WEBM output formats
- Synchronous and asynchronous rendering via webhooks
At first, it was slow as heck and crashed all the time with more than 10 parallel requests. So I performed all the optimizations I could think of....
And it worked! It is now stable and fully functional.
The last time I tested it, it was capable of generating more than 200 videos per minute. (30 FPS, Full HD, 30s) And based on the data from Google Cloud, I could've pushed it harder and it still could handle it. But I did not want to burn too much money just testing it.
This is literally the first post about anything I've ever built. So thank you for reading it. And if you want to give it a try, you are more than welcome to do so!
But please bear in mind that it is an MVP. First page loads may be slow due to cold starts.
You can check it out here for free:
www.vidgee.com
Documentation is here:
docs.vidgee.com
Your credit will reset to 100 every day, so you can play around with it but not burn a hole into my bank account haha.
Btw. it can actually generate images too. But that was not the main purpose. I thought it would be nice if you could generate thumbnails for your videos the same way you generate videos.
Now it's time to figure out how to market this thing.
Yeah, I know I should not build first and market second but who cares? If it flops, I'll at least have a cool project to show when looking for a new job haha.
It's been quite a ride. This is the most complicated thing I've ever built but it was a lot of fun.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
