claude-real-video

claude-real-video lets an LLM actually watch a video instead of guessing from a title. It pulls the frames that matter, using scene-change detection so it grabs a new frame when the picture changes, not every few seconds, deduplicates the near-identical ones, and optionally transcribes the audio with Whisper. Out comes a set of frames, a transcript, and a manifest you feed to Claude or any model. The core is MIT and free, and it all runs on your machine.

Setup is a notch above pip-install because it leans on ffmpeg, the video-processing workhorse, which you install once at the system level. After that it is Python 3.10+ and a package install, with Whisper optional if you want transcription. Nothing leaves your laptop, which matters if the footage is sensitive.

The free tier is the useful 90 percent: frame extraction, dedup, transcript. A one-time Pro unlock (founder price around $19, not a subscription) adds analysis on top, camera-movement classification, editing-rhythm detection, and a perception timeline of gestures and sound events. For most people wanting to hand a video to an LLM, free is plenty. Pay the $19 only if you are doing real video teardowns and want the extra structure.

The catch is scope. This prepares video for a model, it does not understand it, the understanding still happens in whatever LLM you pipe the output into. It is a very good front door, not the whole house.