Testing & QA

9 CTV Creative Readiness Mistakes That Pass Validation and Still Kill Fill

On 13 October 2026, Pixalate shipped Ad Fraud API 3.0 with named invalid-traffic reason codes, including SSAI Misrepresentation for requests that cl…

Nano Banana Pro Prompt Guide: 8 Copy-Paste Prompts (and How to Turn Them into Video)

Nano Banana Pro is Google DeepMind's image model built on Gemini 3 Pro. Most of its strengths come from the fact that it understands instructions ,…

Claude Code Skills for Content: How I Make Khan Academy Style Videos for Free

I opened a LinkedIn post last week with "I think Claude Code skills are mostly useless." It got about 30,000 impressions and a lot of disagreement,…

EP04: Transport showdown — RTMP / SRT / WHIP

Episode 4 of 20 in the **PPCDN Low-Latency Live Streaming Course * — building a self-hosted, low-latency live-streaming CDN from protocols to global…

I Ran the Zombie Match Cut on 4 Video Models: Frame Timing and Cut Placement

You've probably seen the TikTok trend captioned "would you still love me if I were a zombie." It relies on a classic editing trick: the match cut. T…

Node.js Image Quality: Centre Crop vs Content-Aware Crop for Avatars and Dishes

TL;DR: A content-aware crop is the better default when recipe photos become short promo videos, because faces and plated dishes often sit away from…

Generated Promo Videos API: Store and Expire Game Assets with Telemetry

To store and expire generated promo videos safely, make retention part of the API record instead of relying on a storage folder and a cleanup timer.…

Generate Marketplace Video Thumbnails Through an API (With Stored Poster Frames)

A game marketplace has an awkward publishing constraint: the image representing a seller's video must be moderated before the listing becomes visibl…

Video Generation or Stock Footage: Licensing Control for Fintech Thumbnails

Short answer: choose generated video when shot-level control and repeatable variants justify a larger moderation surface; choose licensed stock when…

Agents Writing Video: `@scenerok/sdk` vs VidScript

People ask a practical question once the demo lands: should my agent write VidScript or TypeScript? The honest answer is the one on the public @scen…

Check whether hls.js is actually using a worker (most ESM setups aren't)

TL;DR If you import Hls from 'hls.js' , you are probably getting the ESM build, and the ESM build does not bundle the transmuxer worker. Transmuxing…

"Hammock Driven Development" (2010)

Build a caption QA harness in Python: WER, missed entities, timing and reading rate

TL;DR We're building a caption evaluation harness that scores a WebVTT file on four axes instead of one: word error rate under a fixed normalizer, m…

Three things that broke when I moved video compression into the browser

I run a video compressor that works entirely in the browser . No upload, no server, nothing leaves the machine. Two of the three bugs below only sho…

The Video That Played Everywhere Except on Phones: A Codec Bug Hiding Behind a Healthy Server.

This is a submission for DEV's Summer Bug Smash: Smash Stories powered by Sentry . The symptom I run snipforge.video , an AI video editing SaaS, sol…

My AI drew the hero as a different man in every scene. It's one guy's life story

I build explainer videos fully automatically. For each scene, a local image-generation AI draws that moment, one frame at a time. I was making one a…

Detect variable frame rate uploads with ffprobe and normalize them before they break your pipeline

TL;DR Screen recordings from OBS, QuickTime, Loom and phone capture are variable frame rate. Feed them to a transcoder that assumes constant frame r…

I asked an agent to make a product video. It wrote HTML and rendered an MP4 - Dota Companion

I needed two videos for a Chrome extension I built: a promo and a walkthrough. I did not want to open a video editor. So I used HyperFrames — HeyGen…

Picking the Right Video Compression Path for Web Delivery: A Practical Decision Guide

When a web team owns video assets, the hardest part is rarely the encoding itself — it's choosing a workflow that fits the team's constraints. Files…

Why Upscaling the Wrong Video File Makes Quality Worse: A Source-First Diagnostic Workflow

Disclosure: I work on PixelatedFix and have a commercial interest in video-quality diagnostics. The workflow below starts with source recovery, corr…

Building a Perceptual Hash Pipeline for Video Deduplication in Python

A single viral clip never stays a single file. Within hours of a video trending, our crawlers pull the "same" clip back a dozen times: re-encoded at…

Running FFmpeg on Heroku: The Ephemeral-Filesystem Trap (and the Fix)

Originally published at ffmpeg-micro.com Your FFmpeg pipeline works on localhost. You push to Heroku, trigger a transcode, and the job vanishes. No…

Build an AI dubbing pipeline: faster-whisper + XTTS-v2 + FFmpeg

TL;DR We're building a script that takes a video in English and produces the same video narrated in Spanish, in a cloned version of the original spe…

Playing HLS through Managed Media Source on iPhone with hls.js

TL;DR iPhone Safari never supported Media Source Extensions, so JS-driven players fell back to native HLS. Since iOS 17.1, Apple ships Managed Media…

Force keyframe-aligned GOPs across an ABR ladder with FFmpeg

TL;DR If your stream hitches on quality switches but shows zero rebuffering, your ABR renditions probably have keyframes in different places. We'll…

5 video APIs compared on what's included before you pay extra (2026)

📦 Code: github.com/USER/video-api-bench - replace before publishing TL;DR The per-minute delivery rate is the easiest number to compare and the leas…

Build a UGC video moderation pipeline with FFmpeg + NudeNet

TL;DR If your product lets strangers upload video, you need moderation before launch, not after the first bad upload. We will build a small-team pip…

ASR-generated subtitles vs forced alignment: why script-first captions fail less

A mistake I keep seeing in subtitle tools is simple but expensive: someone already has an approved script, but the workflow still starts by transcri…

Build scrub-bar thumbnail previews with FFmpeg and a WebVTT sprite

TL;DR We're going to add hover-preview thumbnails (the little image that follows your cursor on a video scrub bar) to a player. Backend is one FFmpe…

Auto-Generate YouTube Thumbnails from Any Video (Make.com + FFmpeg)

Originally published at ffmpeg-micro.com YouTube creators spend 10 to 20 minutes per video picking and editing a thumbnail. Multiply that by daily u…