OpenCut: The open-source CapCut alternative

https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut

by nateb2022 • 1 year ago

447 145 1 year ago

github.com

rtaylorgarlock• 1 year ago

Again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44540804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44355853

edit: I am genuinely curious about spam prevention on HN. What systems we got working against fraudulent actors?

TheObviousOne• 1 year ago

Beside the spam issue...Does the repo legit, though?

NewJazz• 1 year ago

Reposts aren't really moderated unless the previous posts were highly updated/commented and recent.

nateb20222• 1 year ago

Considering the previous posts never got more than 2 points, I didn't think reposting it would be an issue.

I am not a fraudulent actor (not sure what basis there is for that accusation) and generally post things I come across. OpenCut was in my GitHub feed today, seemed like it could be useful to others, ergo I shared it.

danjl• 1 year ago

TIL: there's a GitHub feed https://github.com/explore

tomhow• 1 year ago

This is covered in the FAQ:

If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok.

Three counts as "a small number of reposts", particularly when it's from different users, and the fact that it eventually attracted upvotes and a good discussion indicates the reposts were warranted, as randomness plays a big role in whether or not a submission gets traction.

Also, we don't like to see public "callouts" like this, and the guidelines ask us to avoid accusations of astroturfing, shilling, etc, because a false public accusation is more harmful than a valid one is beneficial. Please contact us at hn@ycombinator.com if you see anything suspicious.

FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jphoward• 1 year ago

Sorry I'm a bit out of the loop, but what's CapCut?

nateb20222• 1 year ago

CapCut is one of several low-barrier video editing apps generally geared towards content creators/ people targeting Instagram reels, TikTok, and short video platforms.

poniko• 1 year ago

Video editor owned by TikTok, very very popular.

xnx• 1 year ago

I really like the idea of an open source alternative to CapCut, but the project is currently very far from the ease-of-use that makess CapCut one of my favorite editors on Windows.

Very few casual desktop CapCut users are going to get past the prerequisits of instal "Bun, Docker and Docker Compose, and Node.js"

Blender, Shotcut, OpenShot, or Kdenlive are probably the better open source video editor options right now.

codedokode3• 1 year ago

Very few casual desktop CapCut users are going to get past the prerequisits of instal "Bun, Docker and Docker Compose, and Node.js"

They just need to pack it as an single AppImage or Electron app. Bun and Docker are made for developers, not users.

yesbut• 1 year ago

Kdenlive

https://kdenlive.org/

simple10• 1 year ago

Nice! I've never heard of Kdenlive. Do you know how it compares to Davinci Resolve's free version?

codedokode3• 1 year ago

It runs on Linux.

Liftyee• 1 year ago

I've made a couple photo/music montages with both tools. Not an advanced user, but I found Kdenlive was more stable on Ubuntu and the UX is similar between the two.

margarina72• 1 year ago

Used it instead on Davinci Resolve on a few computer because Davinci Resolve require GPU and doesn't always recognize it - so it doesn't even start. Kdenlive doesn't have this issue.

WhyNotHugo• 1 year ago

I've tried this tool a few times over the years. It's quite far from being intuitive. Maybe it makes sense to professionals to work in the field full-time, but for a regular mortal who just wants to edit a video, it's impossible to grasp.

Even something as basic as opening a video file is a huge challenge. I can't just open a video file. Instead, I need to "create a new project", which requires that I specify the exact resolution and FPS of the video file beforehand (why!?). After I use a completely separate tool to extract these attributes from the video that I'm editing, I have a blank canvas onto which I can drag the actual video.

codedokode3• 1 year ago

You are doing something wrong. What you need to do is launch kdenlive, then select Project → Add Clip or Folder and select the video. Then drag it into the timeline (I just did some googling the first time).

The UI is somewhat clumsy but I think it is pretty good that we have an open source video editor.

wraptile2• 1 year ago

Been using Kdenlive for everything for years now and it's really feeling great now. There are a few quirks you need to learn but generally it's quite simple and intuitive with a huge community and most big LLMs can guide you through the processes!

blensor• 1 year ago

I recently ( a few months ago ) finally caved an bought Davinci Resolve for linux and despite that I almost exclusively use Kdenlive instead every time I quickly want to make a video.

This of course is most likely a skill issue at my part but it really feels to me like kdenlive is getting in the way of my flow much less than davinci

greatgib2• 1 year ago

I like the idea but looks fishy at this point even if I did not look at the code or try it yet.

So many GitHub stars and not a single screenshot of it anywhere, not on GitHub, not on Google, not on the official webpage that just have a wait-list and their twitter Bash capcut with screenshots of capcut but none of opencutapp.

And I mean I wish something like that to succeed, but it doesn't look like that they have much to show for at the moment.

_lvbh• 1 year ago

https://xcancel.com/OpenCutApp

Follower count and activity looks about right. There's some screenshots there. I assume the star count is due to some amount of marketing.

eddythompson805• 1 year ago

The project is 3 weeks old with mainly 1 guy. I’m curious how you get (legit/organic) 17k start and 3k twitter followers for a 3 week old project presumably while I’m busy with it.

I know buying stars and followers is pretty straight forward.

dawnerd2• 1 year ago

Smells vibe coded too

bsenftner• 1 year ago

I tried to install, and their build instructions do not work. Waste of time, why is this here on HN at all?

aquariusDue• 1 year ago

Probably because it's been trending on GitHub, at least that's how I found it yesterday before it was submitted to HN. After looking at the star chart in the project README and checking out their website it was pretty clear this was another mix of vibecoded half working product masquerading as open-source for promotional reasons.

I'm almost sure that the GitHub stars are manipulated or even bought but it's a baseless accusation on my part. These days Codeberg seems to be closer to what GitHub once aspired to be or more aptly was for a while.

I'd like to rant more about how GitHub is inching closer year by year to LinkedIn for devs with a hint of Product Hunt but eh, what's the point?

laxd2• 1 year ago

Openshot, Shotcut, Opencut ... It's getting confusing.

shawnlower2• 1 year ago

Prefixing your project name with "open" is pretty reasonable, and yet I feel these project names might be worth reconsidering.

Maybe the next version can be called OpenWound or ShotCutStabbed

laxd2• 1 year ago

I was thinking Open ChangeScene Massacre for one of them.

ujkhsjkdhf234• 1 year ago

Someone tell CJ Fly he doesn't have to use the free trial any more.

eddythompson805• 1 year ago

https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/main/apps/web/sr...

Well then.

pram• 1 year ago

I kinda wonder why ByteDance charges for anything in CapCut at all, considering it would make sense to make it as easy and cheap as possible to get more slop on TikTok?

Aurornis5• 1 year ago

Simple: They charge because people pay for it.

It’s the back door way to collect money from content creators and businesses. Most of the people I know who were using CapCut either had their employers pay for it or had some way to tax deduct it as part of their creator activities.

Paying $20/month on top of an actual business is usually trivial, especially if it saves someone time or improves quality of the content.

The TikTok slop posts aren’t spending any time perfecting their edits. They’re mass producing content as rapidly as they can from phone camera to TikTok

Aurornis5• 1 year ago

You probably use CapCut and think your video editing is special. You think your fucking TikTok with 47 transitions and 12 different fonts is going to get you some viral fame. You think loading up every goddamn effect in their library makes your content better. Wrong, motherfucker.

I know this edgy style appeals to some people, but it’s a quick way to alienate most users. Nothing screams “this project is not for you” like copy that feels like it was targeted at impressing someone’s friends in an edgy Discord, not actual potential users.

Although I don’t think this project is trying to appeal to a general audience with the level of technical expertise required to even begin to use it.

deadbabe2• 1 year ago

This style is a way to fight back against the inevitable entitlement that people get when they use an open source software and then demand the creators do this and that.

By dropping any pretense of being polite or approachable, you basically encourage people to shut the f*ck up and either be happy with what they got or else submit a PR.

lucideer2• 1 year ago

While nobody is required to like the copy, or "brand" of any project, commercial or otherwise, I do feel like the rhetoric of your comment is largely grounded in a kind of "maximum appeasement" strategy that belongs in for-profit corporate marketing & isn't really appropriate in the open source community.

For example: there's very reasonable arguments that COCs are needed to protect against actual material harm/bullying/abuse targeting individual contributors on projects but this copy specifically does none of that.

In that context, it's just a matter of taste - there's no real reason to police tone that isn't harmful (to anything other than a bottom line).

nojs• 1 year ago

Definitely AI generated

rfl890• 1 year ago

Looks like a parody of this website: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

vunderba• 1 year ago

Definitely reads like your run-of-the-mill edgy LLM text.

"More "Get Pro" dialogs than a Windows 95 error message"

That screams LLM. Makes absolutely zero sense if you actually grew up in the Win 9x era.

alt187• 1 year ago

It's a parody of the https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ and personally, I love it. I'm not a 15 year old, and swear words in software don't fill me with angst and offence.

eddythompson805• 1 year ago

Oh wow, you’re such a grown up. How did you manage that?

another_twist4• 1 year ago

> useEffect(() => { initializeApp(); }, [initializeApp]);

Thats a weird bit of code. If the function changes execute it ?

Ref: https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/main/apps/web/sr...

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

You often end up doing this to please the linting deities.

They want to make sure you call out dependencies. It annoys me alot when you know they won't change. And if they do (some reference change on render)... well that's just a footgun of React and I argue this doesnt help.

another_twist4• 1 year ago

I think this is the one which detects dependencies of closure. react-hooks/exhaustive-deps is the rule I think.

Makes sense. A few years back, a stale closure bug consumed two full working days and one full night for me.

another_twist4• 1 year ago

I see that ShadCn has been used here. Good choice !

bravesoul23• 1 year ago

Next Photopea?

Also if you love the F word read this file: https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/blob/main/apps/web/sr...

starsep• 1 year ago

https://opencut.app/why-not-capcut

timhigins• 1 year ago

You can test it out at https://opencut.app/projects. I added some screenshots to the README here (https://github.com/alexkreidler/OpenCut/tree/main?tab=readme...) and opened a PR to merge the update upstream.

cddotdotslash• 1 year ago

https://github.com/OpenCut-app/OpenCut/issues/192

I don't know if this style of... discussion is something the Cluely team made popular recently, or if it took off sooner, but I really hope it doesn't catch on further.

edoceo2• 1 year ago

That thread is trash.

If anyone is looking for tips on what to NOT do, it's a gold mine.

Imustaskforhelp2• 1 year ago

You are mentioning as to what Zaid did, right?

arp242• 1 year ago

Cluely seems sort of AI tool? How does that relate to that thread?

Thorrez• 1 year ago

I guess their team posts stuff in a style like that sometimes. E.g.

https://x.com/cluely/status/1932966330904506501

SpaceNoodled• 1 year ago

Not a cluely

lucideer2• 1 year ago

Did anyone read that linked thread in full? There's no "style of discussion" there, there's a lot of people engaging in a very normal, constructive discussion, which is being interupted by a single disruptive commenter (Zaid).

Nothing there seems to reflect poorly on the project as far as I can tell?

lpln34522• 1 year ago

"A single disruptive commenter (Zaid)" And he is one of the top contributors. That doesn't quite fit the narrative that it was just some weirdo interfering.

AlienRobot2• 1 year ago

Wow.

zipping1549• 1 year ago

Huge red flag. I doubt actual good product is coming out from a person with that much attitude on anywhere, let alone their project's issues...

Aurornis5• 1 year ago

Hard to tell who’s who, but the Zaid person who claims to be a maintainer is apparently not a maintainer. He contributed some small changes and started claiming to be a maintainer.

NackerHughes• 1 year ago

Let me introduce you to OpenCart, an open source eCommerce platform in use on hundreds of thousands of websites handling customer payments, recently struck a multi-million dollar deal with PayPal, and whose founder and practically sole developer responds to bug reports and CVEs with careful, well-thought-out replies like "JUST FUCK OFF!":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7526498 https://archive.is/9bHTi (archived version of github issue linked in above thread) https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/24/opencart_vulnerabilit... https://github.com/opencart/opencart/issues/12947#issuecomme...

dqv2• 1 year ago

I really hope it doesn't catch on further

It already has.

It is the late teens/young twenties online communication style. Generally pretty aggressive, but easy to ignore because they are usually not really saying anything of substance. They are "ragebaiting" you.

jszymborski• 1 year ago

I'm sorry, but I'm not going to blame toxic culture in OSS development when it was pioneered by the greats like Torvalds https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-ab...

gorbachev• 1 year ago

Flamewars were a thing long, long ago. They somewhat stopped being a thing when BBSes and Usenet died.

oefrha3• 1 year ago

Assholes online were not “made popular recently”.

Gotta love seeing a code of conduct:

We as members, contributors, and leaders pledge to make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone

And down in Enforcement (emphasis mine):

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported to the community leaders responsible for enforcement at [INSERT CONTACT METHOD]. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated promptly and fairly.

What’s the point of this dance when you can’t bother to fill out the contact.

worthless-trash• 1 year ago

Because the code of conduct is ONLY ever intended to be used as a sword, not as a shield.

mrln• 1 year ago

Probably because it is AI slop and no one ever read that...

jchw2• 1 year ago

Honestly, how many projects with "Code of Conducts" actually use or follow them? Maybe if you're a big CNCF project or something like that, but the average GitHub project just adds one because GitHub told them to. If they were actually more about enforcing community standards and not about social signaling they'd probably just be called "contributing rules" or something boring and nondescript like how Internet rules always have been.

In other words, the point of this dance is to check a box. I mean literally, GitHub will check a box in Insights -> Community Standards when you add one.

recursive2• 1 year ago

I had to add a COC in order to qualify for open source hosting tier on netlify.

no_time3• 1 year ago

Telling someone to fuck off for coming at a for fun OSS project with a trademark claim is completely reasonable.

Uehreka• 1 year ago

If it was a more legit trademark claim that would be one thing, a lot of OSS people think you can just name your project after something popular so you can coast off the reputation of the more popular product.

But since this is a BS claim, I think the following approach is totally appropriate:

- Have one person post the antagonistic garbage the OP deserves

- Have another person play the “rear guard” and follow up with the actual legal reasons they won’t comply.

gruez2• 1 year ago

Why? OSS projects aren't somehow exempt from trademark law, and at the very least can have its repo taken down. The trademark in this case might not be airtight, but that's a separate issue.

gregjw• 1 year ago

yeah, people have attitude problems recently

l0gicpath• 1 year ago

What’s Cluely? While I can google and find out I just wanted to reflect how irrelevant that name actually is for a large portion of the internet.

Flamewars, internet jerks and online bullying has been around since irc. If not longer.

imo looking at the thread, I see a bunch of people throwing a few strongly worded comments at each other in a typical heated discussion online.

We used to call this flamewars.

eddythompson805• 1 year ago

Just another grifter

yellow_lead• 1 year ago

It's a small time contributor making those comments, not the maintainer.

prmoustache• 1 year ago

Who knows, maybe he is just the childish persona of the maintainer. It is rare to use more than one in a specific project but a lot of people maintain more than one persona online.

renewiltord• 1 year ago

Cool dude. I’ll give it a spinach. Nice to see a docker-compose. Should make this easy.

lpln34522• 1 year ago

Promotion without a single screenshot. Not interested in projects with READMEs like this. If it's actually good, it'll spread on its own.

Honestly the 'Project Structure' section which is just a directory listing, feels like it was generated by an LLM.

AlienRobot2• 1 year ago

If it's actually good, it'll spread on its own.

That's not how it works, but I agree it's weird there is no screenshot.

satvikpendem• 1 year ago

"If you build it, they will come" is one of the oldest myths tech founders seem to still believe, even though it's been disproven time and again.

dawnerd2• 1 year ago

There’s been such a massive increase in LLM generated apps being shared especially on the self hosted subreddit. They get mad when you call them out. It’s incredibly obvious.

vrthink• 1 year ago

I’m really excited about the concept of an open-source alternative to CapCut. However, the current state of the project is far from being as user-friendly as CapCut, which is one of my favorite video editors on Windows. The requirement to install Bun, Docker, Docker Compose, and Node.js as prerequisites will likely deter most casual desktop CapCut users from even trying it out. I’m hopeful that with continued development and community support, this new project can evolve into a truly accessible and powerful alternative to CapCut. There’s a lot of potential here, and I’m excited to see where it goes!

hugh1st• 1 year ago

This looks super interesting – how close is the current feature set compared to CapCut? Any plans to support mobile export/editing down the road?

alexfromapex• 1 year ago

Does a waitlist mean it will be monetized?

m-p-3• 1 year ago

Would have enjoyed some screenshots or a quick tour in video form.

snvzz• 1 year ago

There are many video editors (arch example[0]).

What are the pros and cons of this one?

0. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Multim...

m3kw9• 1 year ago

This stuff sounds enterprising

sparkalpha• 1 year ago

I like this!

lompad• 1 year ago

You previously posted this:

Hey, have you tried TwitterCut yet? It’s this cool tool I found that turns your tweets into awesome videos in just one click. Super easy to use—just @cutcutai in a Twitter thread, and it creates the videos directly for you.

Are those tools affiliated or are you affiliated with either?

Imustaskforhelp2• 1 year ago

So I actually pulled the docker compose and now when I try to run it, it opens up at localhost:3100 and when I go there, its just what the website https://opencut.app/ does, and it asks me for wishlist.

I just want to use your application and recommend it to my friend who uses capcut but this seems so AI generated, so ragebait induced with Zaid and the code of conduct is not followed, the stars feels like they are frauded and even though I starred your project, I feel like unstarring it, since I am not even sure if this project has a simple prototype we can use at this point and I am clearly frustrated.

darajava2• 1 year ago

You need to go to opencut.app/projects

montakaoh• 1 year ago

Tried it before and it was barely functional - how is it getting starred?

darajava2• 1 year ago

Most people in this thread seem to be talking about how it's a fake project with fake stars but there is actually a live version linked in this comment[0]. It's pretty good too! I wish the authors would put more time into polishing the README and pointing to the online version but it's missing so many basic features now that it probably only makes sense for developers to currently use.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44554541

arnaudsm• 1 year ago

This is great, there are too few open-source video editing projects!

However, why do you have a waitlist for an open-source project? And why do you brag of having Databuddy analytics built-in?

Are you just a startup that's building in public and using open-source as a marketing trick before monetizing it?

KronisLV• 1 year ago

A simple but powerful video editor that gets the job done. Works on any platform.
Enter your email. Join waitlist
59284 people already joined

I would have expected a bit more from the main page, would be helpful to have a link to the /projects URL that someone else mentioned, or a screenshot demonstrating the software!

For the FOSS video editing software out there, I tried out Shotcut (https://www.shotcut.org/) and OpenShot (https://www.openshot.org/), though both of them were either a bit unpolished or unstable, with the occasional crash along the way.

I had a way better experience with kdenlive, which was my main video editor for a bit, has the basic features I'd expect, as well as decent codec support: https://kdenlive.org/

As for other options, DaVinci Resolve still feels like the more professional software suite that you'd go for, sans the cost, albeit the UI can be a bit awkward in places to someone used to the likes of kdenlive/Sony Vegas: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve

Obscurity4340• 1 year ago

Luma Fusion is amazing as well, wonder your thoughts on it

icemelt8• 1 year ago

I like how open-source software is gate-kept behind complex processes.

motoxpro• 1 year ago

What do you mean? The deployment? It seems pretty straightforward to me. I can't actually see how it could be simpler.

bacchusracine• 1 year ago

Does it actually do anything?

I'm seeing a lot of posts from people discussing everything and anything other than whether or not the application is fit for purpose and does what it's claiming it does.

jchw2• 1 year ago

I played with it for a few seconds. As someone mentioned here, you have to go to opencut.app/projects to actually see the actual application.

Most features are still just TODO, but you can at least overlay text onto video. The interface seems reasonable so far, basically works like any other NLE I've ever used. If this continued to evolve, I can only imagine many would consider it to be a very useful tool to have available.

bityard• 1 year ago

Uh, if it's open source, why is there a waitlist?

What is there to wait on and what do they need your email for?

Pretty fishy. (Or phishy?)

tobi_bsf• 1 year ago

Not sure if they have a feeling for what makes CapCut. Mostly it’s the remote AI features like magical background removal, instant TikTok style captions, templates, cross platform cloud sync..

No need to make a good, free video editor. We have davinci for that.

OpenCut: The open-source CapCut alternative

Related Stories