# Let Claude Desktop and Cursor actually watch videos (MCP, fully local)

> Source: <https://dev.to/huangchihhungleo/let-claude-desktop-and-cursor-actually-watch-videos-mcp-fully-local-2gnf>
> Published: 2026-08-03 02:16:29+00:00

My AI agent learned to watch videos this week. Here is the 3-line version of how to give yours the same ability.

[claude-real-video](https://github.com/HUANGCHIHHUNGLeo/claude-real-video) (MIT, 1.9k stars) extracts scene-aware, deduplicated keyframes plus a timestamped transcript from any video URL or local file — all processing on your machine. Since 0.8.0 it ships as an MCP server, so MCP clients can request a video directly.

```
pip install 'claude-real-video[mcp]'
```

Claude Code:

```
claude mcp add crv -- crv-mcp
```

Claude Desktop — add to `claude_desktop_config.json`

:

```
{ "mcpServers": { "crv": { "command": "crv-mcp" } } }
```

Cursor and any other MCP client: same stdio command, `crv-mcp`

.

Two tools show up:

`watch_video(source, max_frames, language, transcribe)`

— downloads (URL) or reads (local file), extracts keyframes at scene changes, drops near-duplicates, transcribes with Whisper, and returns the transcript plus the first batch of frames as images straight into the conversation.`get_frames(source, start_index, count)`

— pages through the rest of the frames.Analyses are cached per source under `~/.cache/crv-mcp`

, so a follow-up question about the same video is instant.

Fixed-interval sampling wastes context on near-identical frames and still misses fast cuts. Scene detection keeps the frames that actually differ: a 58-second test clip goes from 58 sampled frames to 26 that matter. Fewer tokens, nothing missed. The benchmark folder in the repo has the full comparison, reproducible.

`pip install 'claude-real-video[whisper]'`

or `[fast]`

); frames work without it.