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VidStudio, a browser based video editor that doesn't upload your files

Details

External ID
47847558
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
VidStudio, a browser based video editor that doesn't upload your files
Website domain
vidstudio.app
Launched
April 21, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
301
Upvotes percentile
0.9794344473007712
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

Hi HN, I built VidStudio, a privacy focused video editor that runs in the browser. I tried to keep it as frictionless as possible, so there are no accounts and no uploads. Everything is persisted on your machine.Some of the features: multi-track timeline, frame accurate seek, MP4 export, audio, video, image, and text tracks, and a WebGL backed canvas where available. It also works on mobile.Under the hood, WebCodecs handles frame decode for timeline playback and scrubbing, which is what makes seeking responsive since decode runs on the hardware decoder when the browser supports it. FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly handles final encode, format conversion, and anything WebCodecs does not cover. Rendering goes through Pixi.js on a WebGL canvas, with a software fallback when WebGL is not available. Projects live in IndexedDB and the heavy work runs in Web Workers so the UI stays responsive during exports.Happy to answer technical questions about the tradeoffs involved in keeping the whole pipeline client-side. Any feedback welcome.Link: https://vidstudio.app/video-editor

Enrichment

Theme
screen recording and demo creation tools
Vertical
Media & entertainment
Function
Content generation
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
browser-based video editor without cloud uploads
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial The frontend UI and timeline editor are vibe-codeable, but frame-accurate multi-track video seeking, audio synchronization, and hardware-accelerated canvas compositing using WebCodecs and FFmpeg WASM are technically demanding.

What it would actually take: The application relies on React/Vue for the timeline UI, WebCodecs (VideoDecoder/AudioDecoder) for fast frame extraction, OffscreenCanvas/WebGL for layer composition and shaders, and FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly with multi-threading (SharedArrayBuffer) for muxing/exporting. The hard parts include handling variable frame rate (VFR) media, synchronizing non-blocking audio buffers with frame-exact visual scrubbing, and managing browser memory limits during high-resolution video decoding.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Remotion, Cloud-based video editors (mentioned as backed by cloud juggernauts)

Concerns raised: Firefox browser compatibility issues, Mobile memory constraints and OOM crashes with large 4K files, WebAssembly FFmpeg performance and multithreading bugs, Codec support gaps across browsers and platforms, IndexedDB storage quota limits for large video imports

Feature requests: Automatic subtitles, Better long video handling, Improved codec compatibility across muxer software

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 254 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #8 of 255 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 171 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.