Thirty-two published videos were the raw render output. One 20-second catalog
preview was 60 MB at 25 Mbps — Blu-ray bitrate for a screen capture in a docs
page. Nothing autoplays, so no page shipped that silently, but a reader who
pressed play paid for it.
Re-encoded at 1280 wide, CRF 28, faststart, keeping audio where it existed.
Measured PSNR against the originals at ~38.5 dB, which is visually identical —
the first check I ran returned nothing and I mistook that for a pass, so this
number comes from a filter that actually worked.
Worth correcting one thing I said earlier: the catalog is not systemically
over-encoded. 190 videos, 0.36 GB, about 1.9 MB each. Six were over 10 MB. I
found two monsters and generalised from them.
Pages carrying more than 8 MB of video: 26 before, and the heaviest went from
140 MB to under 15 MB.
The durable fix is in generate-catalog-previews.ts, which had no delivery encode
at all — it published the render master directly. It has a web pass now, so the
next preview is born small instead of being cleaned up later.
**The catalog generator destroys hand-written documentation on every run.** It
does `rmSync(dir, { recursive: true })` on both catalog folders before
regenerating, so any section a human added to a generated page is deleted the
next time anyone runs it. There is now a carry-forward pass that reads those
sections off the existing pages first and re-emits any heading the template does
not own. Note this prevents future loss only — the earlier regeneration in this
stack already removed what was there, and it is recoverable from git if wanted.
It was also clobbering `docs.json`: rebuilding the Catalog tab dropped its icon
and unlinked `catalog/index.mdx` from the sidebar entirely.
And 27 of 36 component pages told the reader to "see the comment header in the
file" when no such header exists. The generator reads the file now and only says
it when true.
On presentation: 1,365 table rows across 168 pages became 0. `## Details` was a
table whose rows were "Type: Block" and the duration; `## Files` was three
columns where most items have exactly one file. Both are one sentence now. The
preview leads the page instead of sitting under title, description, tags, a
warning and a credit — four of which Mintlify already renders from frontmatter.
**Two guides that showed nothing now show the thing.** Background removal plays a
real cutout with the matte magnified at the hair edge and at a shoulder a plant
overlapped, because those are where matting fails. HDR is the honest one: you
cannot show HDR brightness on an SDR page, so it shows the `ffprobe` verdict and
a measured round-trip — 4000 nits authored, 4012 back out — and says on screen
for all 26 seconds that it is not simulating anything.
Both films were checked before publishing: no black or frozen stretches, and read
at the real 590px docs column width rather than full size. Nav after regeneration:
307 pages, 0 dangling, 0 redirect collisions.
ukimsanov