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Show HN: Open-source tool to generate a video from any Wikipedia page (github.com/aileftech)
35 points by ailef on June 28, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
Hi HN,

this is a tool I built for fun two years ago, which I now decided to release as open source.

It's a Java program that takes a Wikipedia page as input creates a video narrating the content of the page using a combination of sources for images and videos, plus Amazon Polly for speech synthesis.

At the time, I wrote a detailed explanation[1] of how the tool works, if you're interested.

The project is not active or currently maintained - I'm just releasing it because a few people requested it to me, and so I thought I might as well post it here!

EDIT: Forgot to specify: although, in theory, this works with any Wikipedia page, it might not do so very well (or at all) in a few cases. For example if the input page is very short or it has an ambiguous word which will then not result in good matching images from Pixabay.



There was a startup in 2009 or so that did exactly this. Got millions in investment and disappeared? Can’t remember the name now.

As far as I can tell, this sort of use of Wikipedia content - even for a monetized YouTube video - isn’t inherently against the CC-BY-SA terms. Though, you have made one change, you created a character called the storyteller who introduces each text, and a brand for that channel. That might make it a little questionable legally, even though you credit Wikipedia in the description. Also under the terms of a ShareAlike license, it seems to me that you should also provide the raw generated video under the same terms.

Maybe do a little inquiry into how to do this right? It seems your project is basically abandoned now though?

Source: my own knowledge - I did work on media licensing CC content years ago, but am not a lawyer.


Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah, the project is basically abandoned. That's why I didn't research further into the licensing stuff (although at the time I thought attribution was good enough).

The content has never been monetized, since it's also against YouTube TOS to monetize automatically generated videos.


Neat. Thanks for taking the time to post and show it off.

Do you feel as though you're essentially done with the project or is this something you'd like to see yourself working on in the future? neilk brought up that a startup tried this concept so it would seem that there is - or, rather was a niche in the market for it. But very cool and well done.


Two years ago, I tried to repurpose the tool to build videos from random blogs article, and I almost made it to a complete Wordpress plugin. It worked slightly differently in that it wouldn't have any voice but just music, and short phrases from the article on top of the images (taken from the article). Like most of my side projects, it ended up 80% complete and then I stopped :)

There's Lumen5 though that does something very similar: https://lumen5.com/




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