Video-use: Edit videos with coding agents

Introducing video-use — edit videos with Claude Code. 100% open source.

Drop raw footage in a folder, chat with Claude Code, get final.mp4

back. Works for any content — talking heads, montages, tutorials, travel, interviews — without presets or menus.

Try video-use in Browser Use Cloud.

Cuts out filler words(umm

,uh

, false starts) and dead space between takesAuto color grades every segment (warm cinematic, neutral punch, or any custom ffmpeg chain)30ms audio fades at every cut so you never hear a popBurns subtitles in your style — 2-word UPPERCASE chunks by default, fully customizableGenerates animation overlays viaHyperFrames,Remotion,Manim, or PIL — spawned in parallel sub-agents, one per animationSelf-evaluates the rendered output at every cut boundary before showing you anythingPersists session memory inproject.md

so next week's session picks up where you left off

Paste into Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, Openclaw, or any agent with shell access:

Set up https://github.com/browser-use/video-use for me.

Read install.md first to install this repo, wire up ffmpeg, register the skill with whichever agent you're running under, and set up the ElevenLabs API key — ask me to paste it when you need it. Then read SKILL.md for daily usage, and always read helpers/ because that's where the editing scripts live. After install, don't transcribe anything on your own — just tell me it's ready and wait for me to drop footage into a folder.

The agent handles the clone, dependencies, skill registration, and prompts you once for your ElevenLabs API key (grab one at elevenlabs.io/app/settings/api-keys).

Then point your agent at a folder of raw takes:

cd /path/to/your/videos
claude    # or codex, hermes, etc.

For always-on editing from your own VPS or Telegram, run the agent through Browser Use Box. Watch the 15-second demo.

And in the session:

edit these into a launch video

It inventories the sources, proposes a strategy, waits for your OK, then produces edit/final.mp4

next to your sources. All outputs live in <videos_dir>/edit/

— the skill directory stays clean.

If you'd rather do it by hand:

git clone https://github.com/browser-use/video-use ~/Developer/video-use
ln -sfn ~/Developer/video-use ~/.claude/skills/video-use        # Claude Code

cd ~/Developer/video-use
uv sync                         # or: pip install -e .
brew install ffmpeg             # required
brew install yt-dlp             # optional, for down online sources

cp .env.example .env
$EDITOR .env                    # ELEVENLABS_API_KEY=...

The LLM never watches the video. It reads it — through two layers that together give it everything it needs to cut with word-boundary precision.

Layer 1 — Audio transcript (always loaded). One ElevenLabs Scribe call per source gives word-level timestamps, speaker diarization, and audio events ((laughter)

, (applause)

, (sigh)

). All takes pack into a single ~12KB takes_packed.md

— the LLM's primary reading view.

## C0103  (duration: 43.0s, 8 phrases)
  [002.52-005.36] S0 Ninety percent of what a web agent does is completely wasted.
  [006.08-006.74] S0 We fixed this.

Layer 2 — Visual composite (on demand). timeline_view

produces a filmstrip + waveform + word labels PNG for any time range. Called only at decision points — ambiguous s, retake comparisons, cut-point sanity checks.

Naive approach: 30,000 frames × 1,500 tokens =

45M tokens of noise. Video Use:12KB text + a handful of PNGs.

Same idea as browser-use giving an LLM a structured DOM instead of a screenshot — but for video.

Transcribe ──> Pack ──> LLM Reasons ──> EDL ──> Render ──> Self-Eval
                                                              │
                                                              └─ issue? fix + re-render (max 3)

The self-eval loop runs timeline_view

on the rendered output at every cut boundary — catches visual jumps, audio pops, hidden subtitles. You see the preview only after it passes.

Text + on-demand visuals. No frame-dumping. The transcript is the surface.Audio is primary, visuals follow. Cuts come from speech boundaries and silence gaps.Ask → confirm → execute → self-eval → persist. Never touch the cut without strategy approval.Zero assumptions about content type. Look, ask, then edit.12 hard rules, artistic freedom elsewhere. Production-correctness is non-negotiable. Taste isn't.

See SKILL.md for the full production rules and editing craft.