Show HN: VidStudio, a browser based video editor that doesn't upload your files

> 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

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

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).

Price?

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.

Wild that apps used to be completely local, no accounts, no uploads, and we're back to that as a value prop.

How does it compare to https://omniclip.app/, https://tooscut.app, or https://clipjs.mohy.dev/ ?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.