Lyons in beta

2025-08-06

When someone says "I'm just going to change rooms real quick" on a zoom call.

I've had this joke rattling around in my head for ages so I decided to finally let it out. Unfortunately, to get to the one-sentence-and-short-looping-video above took around two hours of work.

First, I had to get a clip that looked the way I wanted, which meant I needed to figure out what the hell that style of shot is called in cinematography. That took 30 seconds. It's a SnorriCam. That part was easy because lots of people have posted articles, tutorials, and reddit threads that are variations of "camera thing that makes you look drunk". Then I spent about 30 minutes trying to find a clip I wanted to use.

Once I found a clip I liked, it obviously wasn't the isolated footage I needed so I set out to use ffmpeg to convert the desired 12 seconds to something web-friendly, which ended up being a lot of trial and error. I wanted a incantation command that would give me a minimum-size-maximum-quality gif mp4 that I could loop as if it were a gif. If you've never used ffmpeg, it can do everything you can possible concieve of which can make using it a bit daunting. After a lot of reading and copying and pasting I ended up with the one-liner below. I'm sure it's not right in some way or another, so please don't make fun of me, ffmpeg wizards.

ffmpeg -ss 88 -t 12 -i input.mkv -vf "fps=24,scale=480:-1" -vcodec libx265 output.mp4

Finally, I just had to slap the video into this post. That "just" represents about 45 minutes. As of this writing, this site is built on 11ty which is a very cool static site generator, and also mostly opaque to me in its nuances. I know Markdown, HTML, and CSS well enough, and enough JavaScript to know I don't know any JavaScript. Markdown doesn't support videos like it does images (typically) but it does support HTML and HTML supports <video>. But it turns out that 11ty won't just pass video files through with zero configuration the way it does for images, and I spent a whole lot of time thinking I had the src formatted wrong before I realized what the actual problem was, then a bit more time actually fixing it.

I was perfectly prepared for this post to be one sentence and a short video clip, ha-ha, but after all that effort I figured the real post was the journey to the post.

Please clap.