Hi HN! I built this because I was frustrated that no LLM actually "sees" a video — Claude won't accept video files, ChatGPT reads the transcript only, and Gemini samples at a fixed 1fps (missing fast cuts, over-sampling static slides).
claude-real-video takes a URL or local file and:
1. Extracts frames at every scene change (not fixed intervals) + a density floor 2. Deduplicates with a sliding-window pixel-diff algorithm (so A-B-A interview cutaways don't re-send the same shot) 3. Transcribes audio (prefers embedded subtitles, falls back to Whisper) 4. Optionally keeps the full soundtrack for audio-capable models 5. Writes a clean MANIFEST.txt you can drop into any LLM chat
A 10-min presentation goes from ~600 fixed-interval frames to 5-15 meaningful keyframes. 90%+ token savings with better comprehension.
The dedup approach (v0.2.0) uses real pixel difference on 16x16 RGB thumbnails against a sliding window of the last N kept frames — inspired by videostil's pixelmatch, but simpler and self-contained.
`--report` generates a self-contained HTML showing every keep/drop decision with diff percentages, so you can tune the threshold visually.
pip install claude-real-video && crv "https://youtube.com/watch?v=..." --report
MIT licensed, pure Python + ffmpeg. Happy to answer questions!
I gave Claude a video provided by a county attorney for a speeding ticket I got. It was spot on in its analysis, even though I don’t like what the video showed.
What does it mean that Claude can’t view video; it did it just fine. Or do you mean tool less?
yeah im pretty sure claude code can handle videos. its been doing frame by frame analysis for me with generated video to iterate on pipelines
I think a more or less clunky name like 'llm video preprocessor' would be better description? In any case seems like a you came up with a good project idea. I wonder how long until the sota models will just have this kind of functionallity built in.
Very cool I have something that does this as well along these lines. I’ll dig into yours over the next few days and contribute where and if I can too, awesome to see!