Turn one long video into clips that travel.
Paste a YouTube link → AI finds the viral moments → rendered vertical clips with
karaoke captions, speaker tracking, and virality scores. Self-hosted, on your machine.
AGPL-3.0 · Quick start · Features · Cloud version
Give ClipForge a YouTube URL. It downloads the video, transcribes it (Groq Whisper), scores every moment of the transcript for virality (0–99 with hook/flow/value/trend subscores), then renders the best moments as vertical clips:
- 7 smart layouts — speaker-tracked fill, fit, blur background, split for podcasts, screenshare-aware, gameplay-aware, and Dynamic: active-speaker cuts that follow the conversation, Opus-style
- Karaoke captions — word-by-word highlights, 10+ animated templates, keyword coloring, emoji, translation to 8 languages, profanity censoring
- A transcript editor — recut any clip by checking/unchecking sentences
- Find & exclude prompts — "every moment about pricing", "skip the sponsor reads"
- Direct publishing — connect your own YouTube / TikTok / Instagram apps and post from inside ClipForge
- Exports — SRT, Premiere XML, Final Cut FCPXML
You need Docker and a free Groq API key.
git clone https://github.com/hatimtoor/clipforge
cd clipforge
docker compose up -dOpen http://localhost:8000, create your account, paste your Groq key in Settings, and forge your first clips. That's the whole setup.
Everything runs locally: your videos, your database (bundled Postgres), your keys.
| Self-hosted (this repo) | ClipForge Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Clipping engine, all 7 layouts | ✅ | ✅ |
| Virality scores + find/exclude | ✅ | ✅ |
| Caption templates, translation, editor | ✅ | ✅ |
| Manual publishing (your own platform apps) | ✅ | ✅ (built-in apps) |
| Exports (SRT/XML/FCPXML) | ✅ | ✅ |
| Watchlist — auto-clip new uploads | — | ✅ Pro |
| Digest — work through a channel's back catalog | — | ✅ Pro |
| Auto-posting while you sleep | — | ✅ Pro |
The cloud version exists so ClipForge can keep being built — if you want the automation (or just zero setup), that's the way to support the project.
- Docker (Compose v2) — that's it for the stack
- A Groq API key (free tier works for personal use; add up to 4 keys for more quota)
- Optional: your own YouTube/TikTok/Instagram developer apps for direct publishing
(guides in
docs/)
Runs on x86-64 and ARM64. A 4-core machine renders a typical clip batch in a few minutes; more cores help.
FastAPI backend (backend/) with the pipeline split into services — download
(yt-dlp), transcription (Groq Whisper), analysis (Groq LLM), layout engine
(ffmpeg filtergraphs + YOLO/YuNet speaker tracking), captions (ASS subtitles),
rendering. React + Vite frontend (frontend/). Postgres for state, local JWT
auth, migrations applied automatically on boot.
AGPL-3.0. Self-host freely, modify freely — if you offer a modified version as a network service, share your changes under the same license. "ClipForge" and clipforging.com are trademarks of the ClipForge project.