Geneva, a Rust FFmpeg CLI alternative with HTML/CSS graphics
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I built this for my own use case, and I think other people could benefit from it.It's essentially a Rust rewrite of the ffmpeg CLI command, but with a modern API and good defaults + a native HTML/CSS composition engine that's been fine tuned for speed and memory efficiency. Under the hood, it still uses the libav* codecs from ffmpeg, so it can still work on a variety of formats.Works very well with AI agents too: prompt what kind or intro/animation/graphics you need (or give it a reference), let the LLM come up with the HTML/CSS for it (Opus 5.5 is quite good at this), and let it use them on geneva.It's way faster than the usual alternatives for putting still or animated graphics on videos (remotion, playwright etc.) because it doesn't use a browser or chromium. Everything is rendered natively, in a single pass.
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HN · launched Oct 14, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 73%)
- Media & entertainment
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Similar launches
See all 170 similar launches →Could you build this?
No Writing a custom, memory-efficient native HTML/CSS rendering and composition engine in Rust to feed video frames into FFmpeg requires deep systems-level graphics and video encoding expertise.
What it would actually take: This requires building a custom headless layout and rasterization engine in Rust (similar to a specialized Servo/LiteHTML) integrated with hardware-accelerated 2D rendering (e.g., Skia, Vello, or wgpu). The engineer must manage low-level FFI bindings to libavcodec/libavformat, frame synchronization, zero-copy buffer transfers, and multithreaded video rendering pipelines, requiring elite systems and graphics engineering skills.
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Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 170 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #151 of 171 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 347 days after the earliest competitor.
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