The player was showing a blank white rectangle, which reads as broken. That
is frame zero of each recording — the instant before the page painted. Only
frame zero is white (by 0.5s the real UI is up), but frame zero is exactly
what a browser picks when no poster is set.
Each video now has a poster pulled from ~30% in, where the tool is in a
meaningful state rather than mid-intro. Posters live beside the videos in the
volume and the player derives the URL from the video's own, so adding a new
walkthrough needs no page change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Marty asked why they start muted. Browsers only permit autoplay when a video
is muted, so "expand and play" necessarily meant "expand and play silently" —
and for these that is the wrong trade, because the narration IS the training.
A member's first visit was showing them a silent walkthrough.
So the panel now opens paused with the play button showing. Pressing it is a
user gesture, which means it plays with sound, every time. preload stays
'none' until the panel opens, then goes to 'metadata' so an open panel shows
a real first frame instead of a black rectangle.
Each bar now also carries its runtime ("· 71 sec"), so nobody has to guess
whether they are committing to one minute or ten.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Twelve narrated walkthroughs, one per Suite tool, in Marty's cloned voice.
No screen recording involved: Playwright drives and records the real UI,
ElevenLabs narrates, ffmpeg muxes. Pipeline lives outside this repo at
../video-pipeline.
Placement (Marty's call): TOP of each tool page but COLLAPSED — a one-line
"Watch the walkthrough" bar that auto-opens on a member's first visit to that
specific tool and stays shut after. A video in a separate library never gets
watched; an embedded player pushes the tool below the fold on mobile for every
returning member. First-visit autoplay is muted, so it is never a surprise
noise, and every localStorage access is guarded because it throws outright in
private windows.
Served from the data volume via /tv/<slug>.mp4, NOT from public/. That
directory is already 199MB and another 33MB of MP4 would ride along on every
deploy forever; this way a video can also be re-cut and dropped in without a
rebuild. The route implements HTTP range requests — without them the scrub bar
renders but cannot seek, which looks broken in a way people rarely report.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
martbost