# claude-real-video (crv)

> Lets an agent actually watch footage locally — scene-cut keyframes plus transcript, no upload.

- **Category:** Editing & Post
- **Vendor:** Community (HUANGCHIHHUNGLeo) (community)
- **Pricing:** freemium
- **Verified:** 2026-09-08

## What it does

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.

## Connect

- Claude Code: `claude mcp add crv -- crv-mcp`
- Local: `crv-mcp (after `pip install 'claude-real-video[mcp]'`)`

**Auth:** none

## Capabilities

[video-understanding](https://mcp.film/capabilities/video-understanding.md) · [scene-detection](https://mcp.film/capabilities/scene-detection.md) · `keyframe-extraction` · [transcription](https://mcp.film/capabilities/transcription.md) · `footage-search` · [local-post](https://mcp.film/capabilities/local-post.md)

## Sample tools

`watch_video` · `get_frames` · `get_transcript` · `search_memory` · `list_watched`

## Field notes

MIT, 2,125 stars and 186 forks off a repo created 2026-06-30 — one of the fastest-rising media servers of the summer, released as v0.10.3 on 2026-08-31 and registered as io.github.HUANGCHIHHUNGLeo/claude-real-video. Two traps. First, 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. Second, the GitHub README documents the CLI only — the MCP section, the five tool names and the `crv-mcp` entry point are documented on PyPI and in pyproject.toml on the `master` branch, while the `main` branch still carries 0.4.0 metadata, so read master or PyPI and ignore main. 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. 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 author sells a one-time $19 'crv Pro' with motion analysis and better memory search, and the free memory search is word matching rather than semantic. Downloading from a URL is your legal problem, not the tool's.

## Verification

- Status: Freshly checked (checked today)
- Added: 2026-09-08
- Last verified: 2026-09-08
- Machine JSON: https://mcp.film/api/mcps/claude-real-video.json

## Links

- Docs: https://pypi.org/project/claude-real-video/?utm_source=mcp.film&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=directory&utm_content=claude-real-video%3Adocs
- Repo: https://github.com/HUANGCHIHHUNGLeo/claude-real-video

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Structured data: https://mcp.film/api/mcps/claude-real-video.json · Directory: https://mcp.film