snip

A desktop app to cut, crop and shrink videos, so they fit on Discord, WhatsApp or in an email.

snip runs ffmpeg on your computer, so your videos never leave it.

Features

• Open a video, or drop it anywhere on the window
• Trim it to the part you want
• Crop freely, or to 16:9, 4:3, 3:4 or 9:16
• Pick a target: an 8, 16 or 25 MB file, SD, HD or best quality, or an animated GIF
• Keep the sound, lower its quality or remove it
• Preview the result and save it wherever you like
• See the exact ffmpeg commands it will run

Download

The releases page has, each with ffmpeg included:

• snip-windows-x64-setup.exe: installs snip for your user, with a Start menu entry.
• snip-linux-amd64.deb: for Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 and newer. Install it with sudo apt install ./snip-linux-amd64.deb.
• snip-linux-x86_64.AppImage: for any other Linux distribution from the last few years.
• snip-mac-arm64.dmg: for Macs with Apple silicon (M1 and newer).
• snip-mac-x64.dmg: for Macs with an Intel processor.

To run the AppImage, make it executable and start it:

chmod +x snip-linux-x86_64.AppImage
./snip-linux-x86_64.AppImage

On Ubuntu 24.04 and newer, the system doesn't let AppImages use Chromium's sandbox, so snip turns it off there. snip only shows its own pages, never websites.

On a Mac, open the DMG and drag snip to Applications. snip isn't notarized by Apple, so the first time you open it macOS refuses. Go to System Settings, Privacy & Security, and click Open Anyway, or run this once:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/snip.app

Build from source

You need Node.js 24 or newer, pnpm 12, and ffmpeg 6 or newer built with libx264.

pnpm install
pnpm start

pnpm start runs snip with the ffmpeg on your PATH. It turns off Chromium's sandbox, which needs setup as root on many Linux systems; the downloads keep it where the system allows it. Run the tests with pnpm test. pnpm lint checks the code with oxlint and oxfmt, and pnpm format fixes the formatting; CI runs both checks on every push and pull request.

To build the downloads, run pnpm dist. They land in dist; electron-builder.yml says what goes into them. To include ffmpeg the way the releases do, put it in ffmpeg/bin first; see .github/workflows/release.yml.

How it fits together

snip is an Electron app:

• src/main is the main process. media turns your choices into ffmpeg commands, and videos.js runs them and keeps track of the opened videos.
• src/renderer is the interface: plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript. With pnpm start, Ctrl+R reloads it after a change and Ctrl+Shift+I opens the developer tools.
• src/preload connects the two.

The preview can't play every format ffmpeg reads, like HEVC or WMV. For those, snip first makes a smaller copy to edit with; the conversion still uses the original.

Website

website is the landing page: plain HTML styled with Tailwind. Its stylesheet, tailwind.css, is built from style.css and the classes in index.html, and is committed so the page needs no build step to serve. After changing either file, rebuild it:

npx tailwindcss@3.4.17 -c website/tailwind.config.js -i website/style.css -o website/tailwind.css --minify

Tailwind only includes the classes it finds in index.html, so a new class shows up unstyled until you rebuild.

Good to know

Some presets keep the original video as it is, to save time and quality. With those, the clip can start a few frames early. If you need exact cuts, pick a preset that says nothing about keeping the original.

License

MIT. The downloads include ffmpeg, which is licensed under the GPL. The interface uses the Archivo Black font, licensed under the SIL Open Font License.