6 ms·

Show HN: CodeVideo – Two years in the making to build an event-sourced IDE

Hi everyone! I originally created CodeVideo as a little side project using FFMPEG WASM in the browser as an experiment, but it's since grown into my vision for a completely automated software educational course production system. The idea is that you create the educational content once, then can export the course to multiple formats - as a video (of course!), but also as an interactive webpage, a blog post, or even a book, PDF, or PowerPoint! Basically a "create once, ship everywhere" concept. Things will get more interesting as I incorporate stuff like spell check (for speech) and abstract syntax tree checking (for code), so you can quite literally check the validity of your software course in realtime as you build the course. You can read more about the technical details and history on my Substack launch post: https://codevideo.substack.com/p/launching-codevideo-after-two-years https://codevideo.substack.com/p/launching-codevideo-after-t... And here's the intro video about how to use the studio: https://youtu.be/4nyuhWF6SS0 https://youtu.be/4nyuhWF6SS0 EDIT: added link to the mp4 created in the demo video: https://coffee-app.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/codevideo/v3/a5edf4e4-c512-4b62-b7f9-11dbe689440e.mp4 https://coffee-app.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/codevideo... From an intellectual and software standpoint this product has been (and still is) an absolute blast to build - and as always, I've learned a TON along the way. Very excited to get feedback from the Hacker community - even (maybe especially?) the classic skeptical feedback ;) As an engineer, I always suck at monetization and things like that - I already am wondering if the whole token system is too complex and perhaps a different model would be better. Again, waiting for feedback from everyone. Until then, enjoy the studio!

Jean-Papoulos 2y ago
Add something to tell new users to click on the next button to get going. The interface is so cluttered I had no idea of where to look or what this was for and almost clicked off.
- fullstackchris 2y ago
  Added! Also made the more advanced action buttons (keyboard / spaces) collapsed / expandable.
abraxas 2y ago
Nothing is working for me. Pressing play video gets stuck on step 1. I disabled the ad blocker in case it was interfering but looks like it's something else. Firefox 135.0.1 on Arch Linux
- fullstackchris 2y ago
  Yes, the in-browser playback is quite finicky at the moment... for now the simple step-by-step and time travel buttons (next / previous) are safer... Playback seems to be working on Chrome.. but I will make a note however for Firefox. Thanks for checking it out!
mgkimsal 2y ago
Watched the youtube video - gives a decent overview. Linking that generated video file here would be useful to give people an idea of the output up front. This is something I wish I'd had about 15 years ago when I was teaching online. I think the group I was with would have been able to create video versions of some of our material and have another revenue stream. At the time, we were only synchronous classroom based training - 2 hr sessions X times per week. When students were engaged, it was great! When they weren't, you were just talking in to the void. Being able to package up some of our material in to these sorts of videos - but doing it in a controlled, managed fashion like this, would have been great. By contrast, we had someone make Flash files for us. Fixing any typo took weeks. :/ Product looks good! Good luck to you!
- fullstackchris 2y ago
  Ah yes... I know the pain of creating / editing / scrubbing through educational software courses... part of why I built this :) Thanks a lot for the kind words! And about the link to the video - good point! here it is: https://coffee-app.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/codevideo/v3/a5edf4e4-c512-4b62-b7f9-11dbe689440e.mp4 https://coffee-app.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/codevideo...
seansh 2y ago
Congrats on the launch! The "create once, ship everywhere" concept is super compelling. Being able to repurpose content across formats like this is a huge win for software education. I’ve been building something similar with CodeMic [1] and found that replaying courses *inside* the IDE makes a big difference letting users immediately play with the code instead of just watching a video makes learning way more interactive. Excited to see where you take this! [1] https://codemic.io/ https://codemic.io/
- fullstackchris 2y ago
  Hey thanks for stopping by and the kind words! When I saw your launch post a few weeks ago (months ago? time has become irrelevant) here on HN, my heart skipped a beat, I thought CodeMic was direct competition to CodeVideo - maybe they are, or maybe they are different enough to co-exist :) I anyway immediately dropped my email for the early access! For a brief moment, I looked into a sort of VS Code plugin for CodeVideo but I realized it would be tough with things like mouse and animating typing directly in VS Code (unless I did a complete fork like the Cursor path). But I wasn't quite ready to take all of that on. But yes, I think it's a huge latent space that hasn't been addressed anywhere in the market simply because you need to go half insane to take something on as complex as replayable state management for the IDE.
  - seansh 2y ago
    I agree that it's a huge space and believe there is demand for better presentation of educational material for programming beyond algorithms that fits in a slide. I do think that our approaches are a little different and time will prove which is more effective, or perhaps both in their own ways. For example, CodeMic aims to replace books and blogs for discussions of large codebases and showing changes to code over time, but CodeVideo seems to enhance the experience of writing books and blogs (among other things) by ensuring correctness of the code for example. There's a lot you can do there with that which I never really thought about and is out of scope for CodeMic. If the format is open, perhaps CodeMic and CodeVideo can even import from each other. p.s. can't disagree about the insane part, but still a lot of fun ;)
dsmmcken 2y ago
FYI the "watch video" button in the hero of https://codevideo.io/ https://codevideo.io/ doesn't work, missing the video ID.
- fullstackchris 2y ago
  Great catch - real link shipping to prod as we speak. Thanks for checking out the site!
benpetroski 2y ago
you should leave a bot comment “codevideo is the greatest thing i’ve ever seen"
- fullstackchris 2y ago
  :D lol well at least we know this wasn't generated by an LLM, that's for sure (sorry everyone, my friend's spam post)
nullpoint420 2y ago
[flagged]
- fullstackchris 2y ago
  There is a $499 a month enterprise subscription hidden deep within the account page... ;) but what do you mean exactly? multiple accounts / live sharing sessions? Tied to an org's codebase?
  - tmtvl 2y ago
    Org-mode is an Emacs package which combines a literate programming environment with an office suite and a productivity suite.
    - d-lisp 2y ago
      If html is a markup language and mardown a ... mardown language, then org is all of this and much more. I wish there was an org-mode for everything non-textual, as org-mode solves the textual part of my life quite well.
matcha-video 2y ago
I think this might be really cool, but when I tried clicking "playback actions" (unclear that this button means "play" and won't just take me to a list of actions) there was no sound.
fullstackchris 2y ago
[flagged]
- seansh 2y ago
  I can't understand why your comments were downvoted. Don't let it discourage you. Congrats again on your launch and making it to HN's front page! CodeVideo is incredible and it’s clear that a lot of effort and passion went into it.
icq2006 2y ago
very interesting !

Jean-Papoulos 2y ago

Add something to tell new users to click on the next button to get going. The interface is so cluttered I had no idea of where to look or what this was for and almost clicked off.

fullstackchris 2y ago
Added! Also made the more advanced action buttons (keyboard / spaces) collapsed / expandable.

abraxas 2y ago

Nothing is working for me. Pressing play video gets stuck on step 1. I disabled the ad blocker in case it was interfering but looks like it's something else. Firefox 135.0.1 on Arch Linux

fullstackchris 2y ago
Yes, the in-browser playback is quite finicky at the moment... for now the simple step-by-step and time travel buttons (next / previous) are safer... Playback seems to be working on Chrome.. but I will make a note however for Firefox. Thanks for checking it out!

mgkimsal 2y ago

Watched the youtube video - gives a decent overview. Linking that generated video file here would be useful to give people an idea of the output up front. This is something I wish I'd had about 15 years ago when I was teaching online. I think the group I was with would have been able to create video versions of some of our material and have another revenue stream. At the time, we were only synchronous classroom based training - 2 hr sessions X times per week. When students were engaged, it was great! When they weren't, you were just talking in to the void. Being able to package up some of our material in to these sorts of videos - but doing it in a controlled, managed fashion like this, would have been great. By contrast, we had someone make Flash files for us. Fixing any typo took weeks. :/ Product looks good! Good luck to you!

fullstackchris 2y ago
Ah yes... I know the pain of creating / editing / scrubbing through educational software courses... part of why I built this :) Thanks a lot for the kind words! And about the link to the video - good point! here it is: https://coffee-app.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/codevideo/v3/a5edf4e4-c512-4b62-b7f9-11dbe689440e.mp4 https://coffee-app.sfo2.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/codevideo...

seansh 2y ago

Congrats on the launch! The "create once, ship everywhere" concept is super compelling. Being able to repurpose content across formats like this is a huge win for software education. I’ve been building something similar with CodeMic [1] and found that replaying courses *inside* the IDE makes a big difference letting users immediately play with the code instead of just watching a video makes learning way more interactive. Excited to see where you take this! [1] https://codemic.io/ https://codemic.io/

fullstackchris 2y ago
Hey thanks for stopping by and the kind words! When I saw your launch post a few weeks ago (months ago? time has become irrelevant) here on HN, my heart skipped a beat, I thought CodeMic was direct competition to CodeVideo - maybe they are, or maybe they are different enough to co-exist :) I anyway immediately dropped my email for the early access! For a brief moment, I looked into a sort of VS Code plugin for CodeVideo but I realized it would be tough with things like mouse and animating typing directly in VS Code (unless I did a complete fork like the Cursor path). But I wasn't quite ready to take all of that on. But yes, I think it's a huge latent space that hasn't been addressed anywhere in the market simply because you need to go half insane to take something on as complex as replayable state management for the IDE.
- seansh 2y ago
  I agree that it's a huge space and believe there is demand for better presentation of educational material for programming beyond algorithms that fits in a slide. I do think that our approaches are a little different and time will prove which is more effective, or perhaps both in their own ways. For example, CodeMic aims to replace books and blogs for discussions of large codebases and showing changes to code over time, but CodeVideo seems to enhance the experience of writing books and blogs (among other things) by ensuring correctness of the code for example. There's a lot you can do there with that which I never really thought about and is out of scope for CodeMic. If the format is open, perhaps CodeMic and CodeVideo can even import from each other. p.s. can't disagree about the insane part, but still a lot of fun ;)

dsmmcken 2y ago

FYI the "watch video" button in the hero of https://codevideo.io/ https://codevideo.io/ doesn't work, missing the video ID.

fullstackchris 2y ago
Great catch - real link shipping to prod as we speak. Thanks for checking out the site!

benpetroski 2y ago

you should leave a bot comment “codevideo is the greatest thing i’ve ever seen"

fullstackchris 2y ago
:D lol well at least we know this wasn't generated by an LLM, that's for sure (sorry everyone, my friend's spam post)

nullpoint420 2y ago

[flagged]

fullstackchris 2y ago
There is a $499 a month enterprise subscription hidden deep within the account page... ;) but what do you mean exactly? multiple accounts / live sharing sessions? Tied to an org's codebase?
- tmtvl 2y ago
  Org-mode is an Emacs package which combines a literate programming environment with an office suite and a productivity suite.
  - d-lisp 2y ago
    If html is a markup language and mardown a ... mardown language, then org is all of this and much more. I wish there was an org-mode for everything non-textual, as org-mode solves the textual part of my life quite well.

matcha-video 2y ago

I think this might be really cool, but when I tried clicking "playback actions" (unclear that this button means "play" and won't just take me to a list of actions) there was no sound.

fullstackchris 2y ago

[flagged]

seansh 2y ago
I can't understand why your comments were downvoted. Don't let it discourage you. Congrats again on your launch and making it to HN's front page! CodeVideo is incredible and it’s clear that a lot of effort and passion went into it.

icq2006 2y ago

very interesting !