Simon Willison

Video compressor

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Simon Willison created a video compressor tool that uses the WebAssembly build of FFMPEG to optimize a demo video of his Equal Earth animation recorded on his phone. He employed Claude Fable 5.1 in Claude Code for web to generate the tool, enabling him to publish the optimized video on his blog. The project showcases how modern web technologies can streamline video processing workflows.

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Google AI Blog
Feb 23, 2024

VideoPrism: A foundational visual encoder for video understanding

Posted by Long Zhao, Senior Research Scientist, and Ting Liu, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Research An astounding number of videos are available on the Web, covering a variety of content from everyday moments people share to historical moments to scientific observations, each of which contains a unique record of the world. The right tools could help researchers analyze these videos, transforming how we understand the world around us.

By Google AI
Simon Willison
Sep 13

shot-scraper 1.12

Shot‑scraper 1.12 adds WebP support, allowing users to capture web page screenshots in WebP format with an optional quality setting. The new --quality flag controls compression, while omitting it produces lossless images. WebP screenshots are reported to be significantly smaller than JPEG or PNG equivalents.

Simon Willison
Oct 22

DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video)

The article announces the release of the official music video for "DE STAAT - FREEDOM" by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat. It notes that at 00:44 in the video, visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leave it. The post also mentions the video’s presence on Hacker News and tags it with music, AI, generative‑AI, and pelican‑riding‑a‑bicycle.

Simon Willison
Sep 7

Mercator ↔ Equal Earth

Simon Willison created an animated transition tool that morphs a map from the Mercator projection to the Equal Earth projection using D3. The project was inspired by the recent UN vote on the Equal Earth map projection and was built with GPT‑6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work. It showcases how modern AI and web technologies can visualize complex geospatial transformations.

Simon Willison
Sep 26

Kākāpō Party

Simon Willison presented a closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America, where he showcased a pixel‑art animation of kakapo parrots celebrating a record‑breaking breeding season in 2026. He used Claude Opus 5.5 to generate the animation from Google‑searched kakapo photos, then employed Claude Code with Playwright to record a 15‑second video of the animated HTML5 canvas, which he embedded in his Keynote slide.