Create Website History Videos with wayback-video

What you’ll get

You will create an MP4 video that visually shows how a specific website has changed over time, using its historical snapshots from the Wayback Machine. This approach works by automatically fetching, rendering, and stitching together archived web pages into a video format, giving a clear overview of a site’s design evolution.

Tools you need

• wayback-video (free): A Python command-line tool to generate videos from website archives.
• Python (free): A programming language used to run the wayback-video tool.
• GitHub (freemium): A platform to host and download the wayback-video code.
• Playwright (free): A tool that controls a web browser to take screenshots of archived pages.
• ffmpeg (free): A tool to combine the screenshots into a video file.

Steps

1. Install Python: If you don’t have Python installed, download and install it from the official Python website. Make sure to check the option to ‘Add Python to PATH’ during installation.

2. Install wayback-video: Open your terminal or command prompt and run the following command to install the tool using pip, Python’s package installer:

   pip install wayback-video

   You should see messages indicating that the package and its dependencies are being installed.

3. Install ffmpeg: Download and install ffmpeg from its official website. You will need to add it to your system’s PATH so that wayback-video can find it. The exact steps vary by operating system, but generally involve downloading the binaries and updating your environment variables.

4. Generate the video: Navigate to the directory where you want to save your video in your terminal. Then, run the wayback-video command with the URL of the website you want to archive, and specify your desired settings. For example, to create a video of GitHub’s history from 2008 to the present, scrolling full-page per year:

   wayback-video https://github.com --scroll --interval year --from 2008

   You should see output indicating the tool is fetching data, rendering pages, and then stitching them together. The final MP4 video file will be saved in the current directory.

Original source

This workflow is based on a blog post by tegos, shared on DEV Community. The author created a Python tool called wayback-video to automatically generate videos showing how websites have changed over time by using their archives from the Wayback Machine.

Notes & variations

• Free-tier alternative: This tool is entirely free to use as it relies on open-source software and publicly available archives.
• Common pitfall: Websites that heavily rely on JavaScript or have Service Workers might not render correctly in the archive. The wayback-video tool has built-in measures to handle some of these issues, but complex Single Page Applications (SPAs) can still be problematic.
• Tip for better results: Experiment with different mode options like --scroll (full-page height with animation) or --hybrid (uses pre-captured PNGs with Playwright as a fallback) to see which best suits the website you are archiving and the video style you prefer. The --scroll mode is generally recommended for seeing the full layout evolution.