Viral Clipper
Turn one 8-hour stream into a week of ready-to-post vertical clips — automatically, for the price of a few API tokens.
Built with
- Python
- yt-dlp
- faster-whisper
- Gemini
- ffmpeg
- Flask
Services
- Product design
- Full-stack build
- ML/media pipeline
- Workflow automation
The outcome
Overview
Viral Clipper is our self-hosted answer to the £100+/month "clip-it-for-you" tools. Feed it a long-form stream and it returns finished, captioned, vertical clips ready to post — running on your own machine, so the only thing you pay for is the AI tokens it actually uses. We use it ourselves every week — it turns an afternoon of manual clipping into a hands-off batch.
The challenge
Clippers face the same grind: scrub hours of footage, hunt for the moments that land, reframe everything to vertical, caption it, export. The tools that automate this rent the workflow back to you at a steep monthly price and still keep your footage on their servers. We wanted the same output without the subscription or the lock-in.
The approach
We built an end-to-end pipeline that runs locally and only reaches out to a paid API for the one job worth paying for — judgment about what’s actually interesting. Everything else runs on open tooling on your own hardware.
The pipeline starts with yt-dlp, pulling the source VOD straight from the platform. Audio is transcribed locally with faster-whisper on the GPU, giving us a timed transcript to reason over without sending anything to a third party.
That transcript goes to Gemini, which ranks the stream for the moments most likely to clip well — the spikes, the payoffs, the quotable lines — and returns candidate in/out points. We layer a feature-based detector on top to keep the subject framed: it tracks the on-screen presenter and drives the vertical crop so faces never drift out of frame.
ffmpeg does the cutting, reframing to 9:16, and burns in captions. The whole run is driven from a Flask dashboard where you drop in a VOD, watch the pipeline work, and pull down the finished clips.
The result: an 8-hour stream becomes a batch of post-ready shorts with no manual scrubbing, and the running cost is a handful of API tokens instead of a monthly bill.
Want results like In daily use — saves hours of editing every week?
Tell us about your business and what you need. We reply to every enquiry within two business days.