Show HN: VibeClip – open-source AI video editor you control by chatting

Drop in a long video — podcast, interview, talk, stream — and VibeClip cuts it into vertical, captioned, ready-to-post shorts. Then you refine every clip by chatting: “make clip 2 punchier,” “bigger captions,” “add a zoom at 0:05,” “undo.”

Quick start · Features · How it works · Bring your own key · Configuration · Contributing

Left: the raw clip. Right: after one sentence — “make it mrbeast style and add gameplay underneath” — captioned, reframed to 9:16, and split-screened. Real pipeline output, not a mockup.

Footage: Andy Dickinson (CC-BY) · gameplay: Orbital - No Copyright Gameplay (CC-BY) · Minecraft © Mojang.

Spin up a private instance in three commands. All you add is one LLM key.

git clone https://github.com/oktaydbk54/vibeclip.git
cd vibeclip
cp .env.example .env          # add ONE line: OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
docker compose up -d --build

With the defaults (EMAIL_MODE=console

, REQUIRE_EMAIL_VERIFICATION=false

) sign-up logs you straight in — no email provider needed. Bring an OpenAI or DeepSeek key (DeepSeek is the cheap one), or point LLM_BASE_URL

at any OpenAI-compatible server (Ollama, LM Studio, OpenRouter…). Prefer no Docker? See local install.

🎬 Long → shorts, automatically | Transcribes on-device, scores the strongest moments (hook / flow / value — not a dumb keyword scan), reframes to 9:16 around the speaker, and burns word-synced captions. | 💬 Edit by chatting | A tool-calling agent turns plain language into real edits — trims, filler-word removal (“uhh”/“ee”), zooms, styles, music, b-roll, brand overlays. One undo reverts a whole multi-step plan. | 🎨 Styles in one shot | hormozi , mrbeast , podcast_minimal , kinetic — captions, pace, zoom, music and SFX applied together. Drop in your own preset as a JSON file. | 🖥️ A real studio UI | Web app with a live 9:16 preview, clip cards, a CapCut-style timeline, and the chat copilot right beside it. | 🔑 Your key, your data | Bring your own LLM key (OpenAI · Gemini · Claude · DeepSeek · any compatible endpoint). Nothing is proxied through us — there is no “us.” | 🏠 Self-host first | One Docker command. Speech-to-text and every render run locally via faster-whisper + ffmpeg. AGPL-3.0, no SaaS lock-in. |

        upload
          │
   ┌──────▼───────┐   faster-whisper (local, no API key)
   │  transcribe  │
   └──────┬───────┘
   ┌──────▼────────────┐   LLM "brain" (your key) — structure + scored moments
   │ analyze structure │
   │  find highlights  │
   └──────┬────────────┘
   ┌──────▼───────┐   per clip, replayed from cached intermediates (~2–4s/edit)
   │  auto edit   │  jumpcut → 9:16 reframe → captions → music+ambience (ducked)
   │              │  → SFX → fades   ·   then your chat commands layer on top
   └──────┬───────┘
        export  →  vertical MP4, publish-ready

Only two things ever hit the network: your chosen LLM (to understand intent and score moments) and, optionally, Pexels (stock b-roll). Speech-to-text and all rendering stay on your machine.

VibeClip never ships with a key and never proxies your prompts anywhere except the provider you choose. Two ways to supply one:

Per instance— setOPENAI_API_KEY

(orDEEPSEEK_API_KEY

, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint viaLLM_BASE_URL

) in.env

.Per user— each account pastes its own key on the in-app** Settingspage, with a livetest-connection. Keys areencrypted at rest** and never sent back to the browser.

Speech-to-text runs locally and needs no key.

Everything is driven by .env

(see .env.example

for the full, commented list). The ones that matter most:

Requirements: Python 3.12+, ffmpeg, and the DejaVu fonts (for caption rendering).

cp .env.example .env          # add your LLM key
uv sync                       # or: pip install -e .
python -m chat.app            # → http://127.0.0.1:8765

First run downloads the Whisper model. Prefer the terminal? python -m chat.cli <video.mp4>

.

The repo bundles a small library of royalty-free media (music, ambience, SFX, demo footage) for the built-in styles. Some tracks are CC-BY (Kevin MacLeod) and require crediting in your video description — see the CREDITS

files under assets/

. VibeClip never bundles or uses copyrighted/branded game footage.

Issues and PRs welcome — start with CONTRIBUTING.md. Security reports: see

. Be excellent to each other (

SECURITY.md

code of conduct).

GNU AGPL-3.0 — see LICENSE. You can self-host and modify VibeClip freely; if you run a modified version as a network service, you must offer that modified source to its users. Copyright © 2026 the VibeClip authors.

Built for people who'd rather

talk to their editor than fight it.