Show HN: Kimu – Open-Source Video Editor
68 robinroy03 20 8/4/2025, 4:27:40 PM trykimu.com ↗
I wanted a proper non-linear video editor built for the web. It always annoyed me how there are practically zero functioning web video editors. And here we are :)
Kimu can: - Work with Video, Audio & Text. - Supports Transitions. - Non-Linear Video Editing with z-axis overlays. - Split/trim - Export - A cute AI agent (coming soon!)
I'm in uni and I started this project out of sheer annoyance that there are zero good web video editors. It is open-source here (https://github.com/robinroy03/videoeditor).
What do y'all think?
And for the record I wouldn’t consider that a stress test (a stress test would be more like 3 hours, 100 tracks, 4K and like a dozen precomps that are being reversed or something). That’s just to make sure this thing won’t fall over during casual usage.
You may be inclined to respond that your editor is targeting beginner editors, to which I’d note that beginner editors are MUCH less disciplined than experts when it comes to trimming footage, splitting things up into comps, pre-rendering chunks, using proxies, etc. Beginner editors (I’d know, I used to be one) will dump a 1 hour 4K-HDR iPhone video of a presenter speaking, and a screen recording of presentation slides they accidentally took in 4K60 into your timeline. Being able to demonstrate that you’ve got that level of memory management handled is what separates video editors people can use from mere “good ideas”.
Edit: Another thought, you call your product “Cursor for video editing”, and that’s a valid goal. But bear in mind that a LARGE part of why Cursor is successful is because they didn’t try to build an IDE from scratch. They got to absorb all of the nice UX (not to mention the extensive plugin ecosystem) of VS Code, and then spend their time on AI features. If that’s how you want to spend your time, you definitely don’t want to be building an editor from scratch.
With regard to my attitude: I’ve run into a lot of people who are trying to build “AI video editors”, and many of them don’t realize how intense a basic video editor actually is. It’s the kind of area where, the faster someone gets to the brick wall, the sooner they can start working on getting through it.
Furthermore I think it’s good for them to know that if achieving what I described seems daunting and they want to focus on the AI angle, it’s totally fine to fork an existing mature OSS video editor and just build the AI features on top. That’s what Cursor did for IDEs, and they’re finding a lot of success.
They don't seem to me to be focusing on the AI angle at all. They mention one AI feature as coming soon.
Like the rest of us needing to edit many couple of minutes long videos, there is massive gap in the market for something lighter weight. Look at Capcuts success over Adobe: 200+ million active user per month for Capcut.
Please add the ability to center images if you upload different-sized images, so the smaller images don't all clump in the upper left corner.
I'll try this with larger video clips later
try with larger clips and let me know in discord / github discussions
Also, what makes you think it is vibe coded? Is the app not functioning as you expected? Let me know and I'll fix them asap.
https://opencut.app
Our roadmap included automated captions, color grading and the like. We'll be a capcut alternative on the web.
Why??? You don't need this just because "AI" is popular right now, it will distract you from the goal of developing "video editor built for the web". It's really not going to improve the video editing experience.
I'm thinking of including AI features like captions, auto color grading etc. I get your point of forcing AI, we won't do that.
No AI for AI, but AI for making it more accessible and helping novice users to also make cinematic videos.