Posted December 22, 2025 by Millie Squilly
I thought I should write a few things in addition to what's in the "about" page of the deck, in terms of how to actually achieve the whole "FMV in Decker" thing.
So essentially what you're doing is turning your video into a 16-colour animated GIF, importing that into Decker, and then playing it back essentially by swapping frames into your canvas one at a time. I figure if you have a look at the code in the deck it should be straightforward but there are a few extra things.
First of all, Decker creator Internet Janitor tells me that you can access all the images in a field using its .images attribute, without having to manually mess with the rich text like I'm doing. So that could make your code a bit neater than mine.
Also, it's worth noting that I've previously experimented with this in Decker's native black and white, as in the following example: https://zine.milliesquilly.com/videotest2.html which also has audio and subtitles. The audio is basically just achieved by starting the audio playback when the video starts, although you may need to work something out if it runs longer than 10 seconds. The subtitles are basically just driven by keeping track of what frame you're up to and displaying them accordingly. You could probably do them in a cleverer way, e.g. somehow fitting them in the same rich text field as the video frames, if you are so inclined. But the main reason I want to bring this up is that importing the video in as black and white is a lot more filesize-friendly than going colour like I did with this project. So potentially you can do longer things, if you don't mind them being 1-bit.
And on the palettes, I don't think I mentioned about the palette PNG that I fed into ffmpeg, but it's basically just a 16x16 png file containing the colours you want to use in the palette. Should be easy enough to create in an image editor, maybe eyedrop the Decker palette from a screenshot or some such. Doesn't have to be in any organised fashion as long as all the colours are somewhere there at least once.
As a final note, I just used the default Decker palette for this project, but depending on your video it may be worth experimenting with different colour palettes. I am not sure if there'd be any way to like generate an optimised palette for a certain video but that could be worth a try.