Show HN: VidStudio, a browser based video editor that doesn't upload your files
Hi HN, I built VidStudio, a privacy focused video editor that runs in the browser. I tried to keep it as frictionless as possible, so there are no accounts and no uploads. Everything is persisted on your machine. Some of the features: multi-track timeline, frame accurate seek, MP4 export, audio, video, image, and text tracks, and a WebGL backed canvas where available. It also works on mobile. Under the hood, WebCodecs handles frame decode for timeline playback and scrubbing, which is what makes seeking responsive since decode runs on the hardware decoder when the browser supports it. FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly handles final encode, format conversion, and anything WebCodecs does not cover. Rendering goes through Pixi.js on a WebGL canvas, with a software fallback when WebGL is not available. Projects live in IndexedDB and the heavy work runs in Web Workers so the UI stays responsive during exports. Happy to answer technical questions about the tradeoffs involved in keeping the whole pipeline client-side. Any feedback welcome. Link: https://vidstudio.app/video-editor
Discussion Highlights (19 comments)
elpocko
> FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly handles final encode FFmpeg's license is the LGPL 2.1. VidStudio looks like closed source software, I couldn't see any indication that it's free software. You're distributing this software to run in the client's browser. I'm not a lawyer but I think you're in breach of the terms of the LGPL. https://www.ffmpeg.org/legal.html
xnx
How does it compare to https://omniclip.app/ , https://tooscut.app , or https://clipjs.mohy.dev/ ?
spuzvabob
I've built a similar video editor and have been considering pure client side implementation vs transcoding into a known format beforehand, went with transcoding for wider format support and easier video playback implementation. I'm interested in how you handle demuxing different container formats any which ones are supported? I get "Audio decode failed: your browser cannot decode the audio in "41b1aee9-ac65-43f6-b020-e8fed77c3c72_webm.bin". Try re-encoding the file with AAC audio." for a WEBM with no audio. h264/aac MP4 works, is that demuxed with mp4box.js? I noticed seeking (clicking or scrubbing on timeline) initializes a new VideoDecoder and destroys the previous one for every new frame, leading to abysmal performance as you lose decoder state and a lot of decoding work has to be repeated. Plus the decoder reinitialization time. Is that because the demuxing logic doesn't give precise access to encoded frames? iirc mp4box.js didn't support that last time I checked.
prhn
You probably already know this, but I could not import 10-bit video on Windows which I think would be fairly common among the target audience. ffmpeg supports decoding 10-bit video.
Sergey777
Interesting approach—privacy-friendly editing without uploads is compelling. Curious how you handle performance and large files purely in-browser, and what trade-offs there are vs server-based editors.
DoctorOW
Let me just say the performance is absolutely incredible, and the persistence is so transparent. I actually was given access to an in-browser video editor that chokes pretty quickly so I'm impressed. The tracks didn't seem to work well for me. I'm on Firefox on Windows and couldn't drag and drop tracks to change the order, there doesn't seem to be any layer transformation tools (position, rotation, scale) that I could find to counteract it not handling footage of different aspect ratios (I.E. portrait and landscape).
kevmo314
Wild that apps used to be completely local, no accounts, no uploads, and we're back to that as a value prop.
jamiehugo30
Curious how you're handling the MP4 export entirely client-side — are you using FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, or something custom built around the WebCodecs API?
kreco
Sorry for the significantly unrelated comment: Does anyone know if there is any limitation to create a "https-local://" or something like that, which guarantee that things are only downloaded, and never uploaded?
Unsponsoredio
Wild that privacy became a feature and not the default. Building in this space too and the no uploads needed angle is surprisingly hard to communicate to users who've been trained to expect everything to live in the cloud.
lern_too_spel
I've seen dozens of these posted to HN. Surprisingly, there is a lack of browser based video editors for media libraries, which means I have to load the video over the network using WebDAV or Samba, edit it locally, and then upload it back. It's a niche use case, but the people who manage their own photos and video storage are generally tech savvy, so it's surprising that no such tools exist.
woodydesign
I love no accounts and no cloud a lot! Wondering if it support subtitle and transcript? It would be helpful for non-native speaker use case. Also, can you talk more about the use case difference between VidStudio vs. Finalcut/Imovie/Premiere? I am quite interested. Thanks
giancarlostoro
I worked on something similar for a relative who wanted to know if I could build something like this for them using Claude, and sure enough you can, I wound up having to ditch ffmpeg wasm edition because of a lot of slowness, and when with ffmepg on the backend. Curious how this performs vs ffmpeg on the backend. I'm genuinely surprised there's not 100% browser native solution to this.
shardullavekar
looks great. any plans of abstracting these functions with an LLM integration?
mankins
I recently did something similar but as a Mac app. It sounds like a similar stack, but distributed as an app. FFmpeg (LGPL compilation). I haven't tried Pixi.js, looks interesting. I guess it was good for this. Have you looked at remotion? I found them good for somethings, but ended up using Safari for rendering (instead of remotion's chrome-based rendering) because app packaging was easier that way. https://www.loremlabs.com/cliproom if you're interested in comparing
comicink
This is so cool - will try it out. Pure browser based video editing is ambitious. Are you using Remotion ?
meerab
Congrats on shipping this! I went down the same path for videotobe.com, fully client-side with ffmpeg.wasm, and it fell over on longer videos. The memory ceiling and encode times pushed me to a cloud processing pipeline. You've managed to solve both, the WebCodecs plus Pixi plus ffmpeg.wasm split looks like the right decomposition in hindsight.I processed 3+ hrs of media using VidStudio and it held up. Nicely done!
j1elo
What is the performance difference between native FFmpeg and WebAssembly-translated FFmpeg running in a web browser?
dsalaj
I am really attracted to the idea of local running in-browser tools, since the website is then used only as a distribution medium which is super easy to use. And I really need such a tool, I was eager to test it. However on both my first and second try it failed. I tried to import a video clip recorded on a Pixel phone. In Firefox it failed with a following message: "Your browser does not support the codec "hvc1.2.4.L156". Try a different video." Ok, fair, probably need to use Chrome for this type of tool. Tried it in Chrome: "Audio decode failed: your browser cannot decode the audio in "..._webm.bin". Try re-encoding the file with AAC audio." Sad. Hope you manage to work this out. Let me know if you have a newsletter or something where I can get notified if this gets fixed.