Open source tool to keep video tutorials in your docs up to date

[u/deegit_00]

Screenshots go out of date, but video tutorials are worse. One UI change and the whole video is wrong, and re-recording with a voiceover takes hours.

DemoForge generates the video from a script. The clicks and narration live in a file, so after a UI change you run it again and get a fresh video with the same zooms and voiceover.

Free and open source (MIT): https://github.com/DixitRam/Demo-Forge

Would love to hear if this fits how docs teams work.

[u/Money-Remove-4604]

this is actually brilliant, the whole reshooting thing has been the exact reason my team avoids video tutorials like the plague

have you tried running it against something with rapid UI churn like a saas dashboard that changes every sprint? curious how the script handles elements that shift position or get renamed

[u/deegit_00 → u/Money-Remove-4604]

Thanks!
Yes, I use it on our company's internal dashboard, which changes almost every sprint. If an element just moves, it still works, because the steps find elements by their name or text, not by position, and the zooms follow the new click position. If something gets renamed, that step fails and tells you which element it couldn't find, with a screenshot. Then you fix that one line and run it again.

[u/WriteOnceCutTwice]

I feel the pain that you’re trying to reduce here. One question: I haven’t tried exactly this scenario in existing tools (eg Claude Design). How is your tool better than others? I quickly looked at the repo and you’re using Claude. I’m just curious which parts I wouldn’t get without your tool. Thx

[u/deegit_00 → u/WriteOnceCutTwice]

Thanks! Claude isn't required, it's just an optional helper that can write the script for you. The parts you wouldn't get from Claude alone are the recording and the video.

Claude can write the steps, but DemoForge actually runs them on your real app, records sharp video, zooms in on every click using the real click positions, draws the cursor, plays the voiceover in sync with each step, and gives you an MP4. There's also an editor to fine-tune zooms and cuts. And when the UI changes, you just run the same script again.

[u/fazkan]

This looks cool, but both codex and claude can do that already with computer use.

Is that value that someone can do that remotely in the cloud?

[u/Consistent-Branch-55]

So it's just a wrapper around playwright, ffmpg, and text to speech APIs to explain a dashboard, because uh, it needed a video explanation?

(Edit: Oh I see there's an editor too, still feeling kind of cynical about people packaging playwright as their solution.)

[u/Consistent-Branch-55 → u/Consistent-Branch-55]

Also, I'm just feeling cynical. Doesn't this just shift the work to maintaining your playwright selectors?

[u/Desperate_Dot9434]

Curious how DemoForge handles branching flows, like when the same feature has a slightly different UI path depending on user role or plan tier. Is that something the script format can express, or does it need a separate script per variant?