Video Podcast Maker Lite

A single-purpose pipeline for personal use: topic → narration script → Azure TTS (SSML) → Remotion → 1080p/4K MP4. No external skills, no config files, no bundled templates, the Remotion composition is generated once against the contract below, then reused across videos.

Prerequisites

pip3 install azure-cognitiveservices-speech   # the only Python dependency
export AZURE_SPEECH_KEY="..."      # Azure Speech resource key
export AZURE_SPEECH_REGION="..."   # e.g. eastasia
# ffmpeg + node 18+ required; one Remotion project with npm install done
# Playwright MCP (session browser) needed only for Step 5 BGM fetching

Project discovery (run before Step 1)

1. Locate the Remotion project, the directory containing both src/remotion/index.ts and node_modules/remotion/. Check the current working directory first; if it is not there, ask the user for the project path. Do NOT scan the filesystem, and do NOT create a new project if one exists elsewhere.
2. Inventory existing videos, ls videos/ and ls src/remotion/*Video.tsx. The most recent *Video.tsx is the component to copy in Step 3; videos/ shows which videos already exist.
3. Existing videos/{name}/? Then this is an iteration on that video, not a new one, reuse the directory and re-run only what changed (see Iterating).
4. No project anywhere (first run only) → scaffold once in the working directory: npm init -y && npm i remotion @remotion/cli @remotion/transitions react react-dom, create src/remotion/, and warn the user about the one-time ~2 GB install. All later videos skip this.

Workflow (6 steps)

Run all commands from the project root. All artifacts for one video live in videos/{name}/ inside the project. {name} is lowercase English, hyphen-separated.

Step 1, Write the script: videos/{name}/podcast.txt