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Show HN: OpenEdit – fast, open Source video editing agent

VEED released OpenEdit, an open-source, agent-driven video editing pipeline that uses VEED's HTML renderer, supporting Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini, with no GUI or timeline. The renderer is up to 2.2x faster than Chrome-driven renderers in internal benchmarks, and the tool is available for Apple Silicon Macs running macOS Tahoe 26.0, with Windows and Linux support planned. OpenEdit allows users to edit, cut, reframe, add subtitles, and create motion graphics through natural language prompts, integrating with services like Fal and Figma MCP.

read4 min views1 publishedAug 5, 2026
Show HN: OpenEdit – fast, open Source video editing agent
Image: source

Not the editor you rent, but the one you own.

Install · Usage · Examples · VEED

OpenEdit is an open-source, agent-driven editing pipeline that ships with VEED's HTML renderer — closed source, but free to use.

There is no GUI and no timeline. The pipeline is driven entirely through your coding agent — edit, cut, and reframe footage; layer motion graphics and visual elements; turn slides or websites into video; capture web pages; and pull in any video/image generating service or MCP server when it helps. Source video is optional: stills, slides, generated media, or pure motion graphics are enough when the brief calls for it. Be creative and fluid — try new ideas rather than collapsing every ask onto captions.

This launch video was made in OpenEdit — click it to watch with sound.

| Platform | Apple Silicon Mac, macOS Tahoe 26.0 | | Intel Macs, earlier macOS | Not supported | | Windows, Linux | Planned; prioritisation depends on demand | | Transcription | needed only to caption speech — OpenEdit asks once and remembers: VEED ( |

Download this repo, or install via the command line with:

npx skills add veedstudio/open-edit

OpenEdit uses an agent-agnostic skill and repository guide. It supports Claude Code, Codex, and Gemini; the installed skill prepares the runtime and loads its AGENTS.md

instructions explicitly.

Open your coding agent. For example, with Claude Code:

claude

then ask it:

Add subtitles to my video [VIDEO]

The agent will automatically transcribe your video, analyse the transcript, create a suitable design for your video, and then render it.

After 1-3 minutes, the agent will return your video with subtitles burned in, as well as launch a video previewer. It will also tell you where to find the final MP4.

You can then ask the agent for subtitle amendments, for example:

I don't like the yellow colour, make it darker

Move the text up a bit

When he says "go buy it now", make sure the 'now' really stands out.

You can also hand the agent a reference image to copy a style from:

Add subtitles that look like this [IMG-REF], to my video [VIDEO]

Real outputs, each with the prompt that produced it. Click any example to watch it with sound.

create viral subtitles with /open-edit and translate my video to 5 languages using VEED Lipsync 2.0 on Fal

One source clip, three languages, three caption styles:

Spanish French German
generate 3 viral hooks in Seedance 2.0 on Fal and create dynamic motion graphics using /open-edit

Three AI-generated hooks, three motion-graphic treatments:

use Figma MCP to study my BrandBook and create branded campaign graphics using /open-edit

One brand book, three campaign cards:

Caption styles are authored in HTML and CSS. Rendering does not use a headless browser: there is no browser to install, launch, or keep alive for the duration of a render.

Internal benchmarks measured the renderer up to 2.2x faster than Chrome-driven renderers. These measurements are preliminary and not yet reproducible outside VEED; a documented benchmark and its methodology will follow.

The renderer is integrated but not required. Composition does not depend on it, so Chrome can be used as the render backend instead.

OpenEdit asks once which provider to use and records the answer at the runtime root (.open-edit-prefs.json

); it does not ask again. Every provider writes the same file — runs/<key>/transcript.json

, with real per-word timings — and nothing downstream can tell which one ran.

VEED — best quality, and the default workflow. Requires a VEED account; usage limits are your account's, and a free account covers about 2 minutes of transcription a month, beyond which it needs a plan. The audio track is uploaded and stored in order to transcribe it; the video is not uploaded. By default OpenEdit does not create a VEED project. The agent guides the one-time browser login and stores a refreshable token at veed/.veed-token.json

inside the runtime.

node --import tsx veed/login.ts
node --import tsx veed/go.ts /path/to/video.mp4

WhisperX — free, local and offline; nothing leaves your machine. Installed on request, and the first run also downloads a model. CPU-bound on Apple Silicon, with two quality tiers.

bash pipeline/scripts/install-whisperx.sh                  # on request, once
node --import tsx prep/transcribe.ts /path/to/video.mp4    # --model medium for the better tier

Your own service — produce a Whisper-family JSON however you like (WhisperX, openai-whisper, whisper-timestamped, mlx-whisper, the OpenAI API with timestamp_granularities=["word"]

, or whisper.cpp -oj

) and map it. No credentials pass through OpenEdit.

node --import tsx prep/whisper.ts transcription.json /path/to/video.mp4

Per-word timings are required whichever provider you use: without them the caption reveals drift out of sync with the audio, so a transcript that has none is refused rather than rendered badly.

V1 targets captions. Motion graphics, charts, and brandbook-matched styling render today, but are less exercised than captions and should be expected to have rough edges.

Report defects through GitHub issues.

The editor is licensed under Apache-2.0. The renderer binaries are distributed under PolyForm Shield 1.0.0, which permits commercial use of the videos you produce with no payment to VEED. See LICENSE

and NOTICE

for the full terms.

OpenEdit · powered by VEED

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