Reconstructing a Mixbook movie from its data API with FFmpeg
The article discusses the process of reconstructing a Mixbook movie using FFmpeg. It highlights the challenges faced due to the absence of a direct download option for the animated project. The author details the reverse-engineering steps taken to extract the movie's data from the Mixbook API.
- ▪Mixbook does not provide a download button for animated projects, requiring users to find alternative methods to access their files.
- ▪The movie is constructed frame by frame in the browser, with no actual video file available for download.
- ▪The author successfully retrieves the movie's definition from the Mixbook API, which includes details about segments, transitions, and music tracks.
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Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Hacker News (Newest) |
| Canonical URL | https://segar.me/blog/posts/reconstructing_a_mixbook_movie.html |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 00:31:29 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T01:07:28.629Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T01:07:28.629Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | C_BfEpuMptiO |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Reconstructing a Mixbook Movie with ffmpeg May 23, 2026 Reconstructing a Mixbook Movie with ffmpeg Mixbook emailed me to say my animated project was ready: a short movie built from my photos and set to music. I could watch it in the browser or order a printed copy. I could not download it. There is no download button, and Mixbook's help docs say one does not exist. I wanted the file. Getting it became a small reverse-engineering exercise, because the reason there's no download button is more interesting than a missing feature. There is no video file to download. Your browser builds the movie frame by frame every time you press play. One caveat up front: this was my own project, reached through my own shareable view link.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Newest).
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