SimpleClips

Why I built it

I make a lot of short clips for this site and for work. The old routine was a mess. Record in one tool. Switch to Giphy to make a GIF. Switch to Adobe Media Encoder to transcode. Drop into Claude to write the ffmpeg command when none of those did the thing I needed. Crop somewhere else. Compress somewhere else again.

So I built one app that does all of it. Get footage in, frame and trim it, set the size and quality, export the format you need. That is the whole flow.

What it does

SimpleClips turns a screen recording or an existing video into a short, right-sized clip, without sending anything off the machine.

• Records your screen. Full display or a region you drag a box around. The box shows the true pixel size even on a scaled HiDPI monitor, fades to a thin click-through outline while recording, and never shows up in the capture.
• Takes almost any video. MP4, MOV, GIF, WebM, MKV, AVI, and more. One file, several, or a whole folder. The original is never touched.
• Crops and trims by eye. Drag the corners to frame, drag the timeline handles for in and out, and playback loops inside the trim so you can check your points.
• Sizes it exactly. Scale by percent or type an exact width or height and the other side follows. You can only scale down, never invent pixels.
• One quality slider. Optimized to High fidelity. It changes compression only, never resolution. What you set is what you get.
• Shows the size before you export. A live estimate, plus a "harder estimate" that encodes a real sample at your settings and measures it.

Local only, by design

Nothing leaves your computer. Capture, encoding, and even captions all run locally. Captions use whisper.cpp on-device, so subtitles work with no internet. ffmpeg and whisper ship inside the app, so there is nothing to install and nothing to set up.

It exports to MP4, GIF, WebM, a web bundle, or a long list of other formats, with auto-numbered names so it never overwrites your files. Drop in a batch and "Export & Next" walks the whole queue.

There are two builds of the same product: the original macOS app and a Windows rebuild. Separate codebases, same behavior wherever the platform allows it.

Role and stack

Designed and built by me. The clips on this very portfolio were sized and compressed with it. Stack: a cross-platform desktop app bundling ffmpeg for encoding and whisper.cpp for offline captions, with separate macOS and Windows builds.