Overview
DemoCreate generates audio-visual demos of software — codebase tours, website walkthroughs, and terminal/CLI demos — from a single declarative, deterministic spine. A Demo is an ordered action stream plus narration chunks, merging CodeVideo's event-sourced virtual-IDE model with VSpeak's chunk/trigger model. Every heavy backend (TTS via Kokoro/Chatterbox, transcription via Whisper, capture via mss/Playwright, animation via Manim, assembly via MoviePy/ffmpeg) sits behind an abstract interface with a pure-Python deterministic default, so the package produces a real demo with only light dependencies and upgrades when extras are installed. On-screen actions are anchored to spoken trigger words via TTS→STT synchronization: narration audio is generated, transcribed back to word-level timestamps, and used to align the action stream with the narration.
Overview source: Curated paper metadata.
Methods and contributions
Read the source for the full argument, qualifications, and evidence.
Findings and contributions
- Across 51 source modules in 7 subsystems, 625 tests pass (3 skipped) under a ≥90% coverage gate, achieving roughly 95%.
- The recorded benchmark reports a 25.8 ms median build and 256.7 ms of render compute per second of output, with complete, monotonic sync timestamps.
- DemoCreate produced two content-verified 1080p H.264 videos: a 128.4 s self-explaining package demo and a 188.0 s demo of a 170-page paper.
- The author states DemoCreate is narrower than agentic generators and less specialized than asciinema for terminals, but uniquely combines declarative, deterministic, narrated, paper-capable demos.
- The steganographic provenance payload survives only in lossless PNG sidecars; H.264 encoding destroys it, so the MP4 carries provenance via container tags and on-screen bars.
Methods
- Declarative Demo schema of typed Actions and narration Chunks (JSON/YAML) — Represents a demo as a validated value of scenes, narration chunks and typed actions that round-trips losslessly through JSON and YAML; rendering is a pure function of it.
- Abstract backend interfaces with pure-Python deterministic defaults — TTS, transcription, capture, assembly and PDF ingestion each sit behind an abstract interface whose 'auto' factory resolves to a light default; heavy backends are guarded.
- TTS-to-STT round-trip with fuzzy trigger-word anchoring — Narration is synthesized, transcribed back to word-level timestamps, and each action's trigger_word is fuzzy-matched to get an absolute millisecond timestamp.
- Poppler-CLI paper subsystem for research-paper demos — Reads a PDF with poppler utilities to extract title, abstract (skipping the TOC), captions, sections, figures and pages, and composes them into a narrated demo.
- Real-filesystem test suite, content verifier and benchmark file — Evaluates the package with a coverage-gated test suite, a verifier that checks rendered video has non-silent, non-black streams, and a reproducible benchmark file.
Summary sources: Paper metadata and evidence · Extracted source text.
Document downloads
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- democreate-0.6.2-manuscript.pdf PDF · 1.19 MiB · extracted-text source
Citation
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Catalog details and resources
Related works
Ranked by recorded methods, topics, contributors and associated software, with contributor roles and domain-only matches labelled. Metadata overlap is not a citation or a scientific equivalence.