AI-Youtube-Shorts-Generator

This one turns long YouTube videos into vertical shorts. It pulls the transcript, has an LLM rank the segments most likely to pop, and auto-crops them to 9:16. It bills itself, accurately, as the open-source alternative to Opus Clip, Klap, Vidyo.ai, and SubMagic, and the code is MIT.

Here's the honest part: "open source" does not mean "free to run." Every mode needs a paid API key. The default mode wants a paid MUAPI key for download, transcription, and cropping. The local mode drops MUAPI but still needs a paid OpenAI or Gemini key for the ranking step, plus ffmpeg installed. So you own the code, but you rent the intelligence.

Setup is a standard Python clone, venv, pip, configure-keys affair, moderate, nothing scary. For a developer who wants to clip at volume and control the pipeline, paying per-use API costs can undercut a monthly SaaS subscription, and there are no watermarks. Solo creators and small teams are the audience. Compare your expected API spend against Opus Clip's monthly price before you decide.

The catch is twofold. One, it's pay-to-run, so "free" is the wrong mental model, budget for the API calls. Two, the project's commit history is thin, which for a tool leaning on fast-moving APIs is a maintenance risk worth watching. It works today and the code is real, but treat it as a scaffold you may end up maintaining yourself, not a turnkey product.