Markdown SVG upgrades
- ID
- 14719
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 17 Aug 2026, 7:59 AM
- Fetched
- 17 Aug 2026, 8:23 AM
- Provider
- Simon Willison
- Category
- developer-ai
- Original URL
- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/16/markdown-svg-upgrades/
- Source URL
- https://simonwillison.net/atom/everything/
Summary
- Score
- 5.5
- Created
- 17 Aug 2026, 8:23 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
Simon Willison updated his markdown-svg-renderer tool, which renders Markdown containing SVG documents and provides export tabs for PNG and JPEG. A new MP4 tab detects SVG animations, guesses loop duration, renders frames, and uses 30+MB of ffmpeg.wasm compiled to WebAssembly to produce an MP4 video entirely in-browser.
Why it matters
If you share AI-generated animated SVGs on platforms that don't support SVG animation natively, this tool lets you convert them to MP4 without installing ffmpeg locally—but be aware it downloads 30+MB of WASM to do so.
Discussion angle
The tradeoff of loading 30+MB of ffmpeg.wasm for a one-off in-browser video conversion versus using a local CLI tool, and when heavy WASM dependencies are justified in client-side utilities.