A Windows factory for turning YouTube longs into TikTok shorts

What it does

YT Short Clipper is a Windows desktop app that ingests a long-form YouTube video and spits out 9:16 portrait clips ready for short-form platforms. It uses yt-dlp to pull the video and its existing subtitle track, then feeds the transcript to an OpenAI-compatible LLM that proposes highlight segments. Each chosen segment gets cut, reframed, and burned with word-by-word captions without ever calling a separate transcription API.

The interesting bit

The architecture is an unusual trio: a React/TypeScript frontend inside a Tauri v2 Rust shell, talking to a Python sidecar that does the actual yt-dlp, FFmpeg, and MediaPipe heavy lifting. The app cleverly skips local Whisper or cloud transcription entirely by burning captions directly from YouTube’s own subtitle track, and its “AI direction” feature lets you steer clip selection with free text—even pinning an exact clock range that bypasses the default 58–120 second guardrails.

Key highlights

• Portrait reframe offers face-tracking via MediaPipe or faster centered modes with black bars or blurred fill
• Works with any OpenAI-compatible LLM endpoint, including local options through vLLM or Ollama
• Ships as a portable Windows zip with a WebView2 bootstrapper—no installer wizard
• Optional direct upload to the Repliz social media platform
• Includes telemetry and dynamic sidebar links phoned home to the maintainer’s api.ytclip.org backend

Caveats

• Windows only: it expects PowerShell build scripts, WebView2, and reads fonts from C:\Windows\Fonts
• Explicitly beta, with the README warning of rough edges and breaking changes between releases
• Requires your own live YouTube cookies.txt for subtitle and video access, which can stale-date and trigger 403s

Verdict

Content creators and social-media editors who need to repurpose long YouTube content into short-form clips will find this a focused, if opinionated, pipeline. macOS and Linux users, or anyone uncomfortable with exporting live YouTube cookies into a third-party app, should look elsewhere.