{
  "slug": "claude-real-video",
  "name": "claude-real-video (crv)",
  "vendor": "Community (HUANGCHIHHUNGLeo)",
  "official": false,
  "category": "editing-post",
  "featured": false,
  "tagline": "Lets an agent actually watch footage locally — scene-cut keyframes plus transcript, no upload.",
  "description": "crv turns a local file or a URL into something an LLM can read: it detects scene changes with ffmpeg rather than sampling on a fixed interval, deduplicates near-identical frames by pixel difference, transcribes the audio with Whisper, and hands back frames plus a manifest. The MCP mode adds a memory layer — every watched video is indexed, so an agent can ask questions across the whole library instead of one clip at a time. For a filmmaker-agent this is the dailies-review bench that TwelveLabs and Valossa do in the cloud, done on your own machine with nothing leaving it.",
  "capabilities": [
    "video-understanding",
    "scene-detection",
    "keyframe-extraction",
    "transcription",
    "footage-search",
    "local-post"
  ],
  "tools_sample": [
    "watch_video",
    "get_frames",
    "get_transcript",
    "search_memory",
    "list_watched"
  ],
  "install": {
    "claude_code": "claude mcp add crv -- crv-mcp",
    "remote_url": null,
    "stdio_command": "crv-mcp (after `pip install 'claude-real-video[mcp]'`)"
  },
  "auth": {
    "type": "none",
    "env_var": null,
    "key_url": null
  },
  "pricing": "freemium",
  "links": {
    "repo": "https://github.com/HUANGCHIHHUNGLeo/claude-real-video",
    "docs": "https://pypi.org/project/claude-real-video/",
    "site": null
  },
  "added": "2026-09-08",
  "verified": "2026-10-22",
  "notes": "MIT, 2,250 stars and 202 forks off a repo created 2026-06-30, last pushed 2026-10-08; PyPI is at v0.10.7 (2026-09-26), and the server was registered as io.github.HUANGCHIHHUNGLeo/claude-real-video. The main trap: MCP is an extra, not the default. Plain `pip install claude-real-video` gives you the `crv` CLI with no server, and the `claude mcp add` line above only works after installing the `[mcp]` extra. The old branch confusion is fixed — `master` is now the default branch and its README documents the MCP mode, the five tools and `crv-mcp` directly; a stale `main` branch still exists, so ignore it if a link lands you there. The README says MCP mode is verified end-to-end on Claude Code only; Claude Desktop and Cursor speak the same stdio protocol but are untested. FFmpeg must be on PATH and is not pip-installable; Python >=3.10; transcription needs the `[whisper]` or `[fast]` extra, which is a large download (`[mlx]` and `[speakers]` extras also exist). Analyses cache under ~/.cache/crv-mcp, so repeat questions are cheap but the directory grows without bound. Frames come back as images, so a long video is expensive in tokens — reach for get_transcript when you only need the words. Free and local, but the upsell has grown: 'crv Pro' is now a one-time $29 (was $19) adding camera, sound and emotion analysis, sold via Capafy and Lemon Squeezy, plus a separate $9.90 'Real Video for Codex' add-on. Downloading from a URL is your legal problem, not the tool's."
}