Ah yes, this can be a bit confusing. We show you a preview of the screen you are recording, which if it’s the same screen you’re on will cause the looping effect. You can just switch to a different tab and do your video, come back and stop the recording. The 3 second countdown is there to prepare you for the recording starting. We will try to make this less confusing though!
Hey Lakshan! Thanks a lot :)
The first beta customers were people in our network from old companies we worked at, we have 2 sales teams which tried us really early on who we knew and also a big remote company tried us because we knew some people there. Besides that we’ve had some YC companies try us, and after that the ProductHunt launch was the first moment we got a lot of new users.
YC for me has been great! We can’t really compare it to “in person” YC but we got a lot of value out of it, they seem to have adapted quite well to the remote world and in some ways I think it’s more practical than before; no 2 hour drive to mountain view for an office hour with a partner. Since we worked at InVision for 2 years we are used to the remote meetings so for us this was kind of a normal way to work I guess. I would definitely recommend YC to people wanting to start their own startup, the amount of information you get in 3 months is crazy.
We have had users make very long recordings with Tella that worked just fine, however we do recommend working in smaller parts. We have a feature called scenes where you can structure your story/video into parts and also record into parts. All of the recording works on the client, so it also depends on your device sometimes; if you have a slow device it can sometimes have issues recording. So to recap, yes there are exceptions where long recordings cause trouble, but overall we’ve seen good results!
Ohhh I didn’t know that! Your project looks cool! I saw you used popcorn.js, that’s definitely a good way to go. It’s an interesting problem to solve for sure :)
Quickly summarized we use puppeteer headfull with docker to do a recording of the video. So you’re right, it’s playing it back, not faster than real time. I might write more about the specifics in the future. It’s mostly open source code, you can start here: https://github.com/Ventricule/html2screen
Thanks for the reply. I was wondering if you were using the headfull chrome approach! I for one would definitely love to read some more specifics on this in the future when you have time! (And if there's anything you can open source please do!). I did a quick side project proof of concept of automating recording a webpage with video and other elements a few months ago. It's a shame there's not a way of just using headless chrome but my research let me to the headfull docker approach, so I'm happy to hear I landed on the same approach you did! Did you discover any novel tricks beyond what's been written about/open sourced already? What was the trickiest part for you?
No worries! Html2screen was a very good start, I modified it to support audio recording and got it to a pretty good state in a couple of days. After that the hard thing was just to run it automated on AWS. I used AWS Batch and Step Functions for that. When it’s a bit more stable I’ll definitely write about it and might open source it later. If you want to discuss more, feel free to email me at [email protected]
Thanks for the compliment! We agree that tools like Google Slides, Figma, etc have definitely set the standard for having a "single source of truth".
Currently we like being in the browser because everybody can use it, but indeed that has some limitations in terms of recording. Eventually we'll definitely have a native app (maybe Electron) for improved recording, but right now with a 2 person team we're trying to keep it lean :)
Not sure if you were asking about testing purposes specifically. To be honest, we don't have a testing stack yet. I am planning to use https://www.checklyhq.com/ for end to end tests.
That's great! I've made an account already a while ago, but didn't have a lot of time to set it up right yet. Would be cool to talk! ([email protected])
