shortsmash

ShortSmash ⚒️

Prompt in. Finished short out.

ShortSmash is an AI video studio that takes one sentence — or today's trends — and ships a finished, captioned 9:16 short, then publishes it to YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Facebook (profiles + Pages) through their official APIs. Script, voiceover, verified stock footage, karaoke captions, music ducking, trend harvesting, batch production, scheduling and comment-reply drafts, all in one CLI. And an MCP server, so AI agents can drive the whole factory.

shortsmash trends food                    # what's hot right now (free, no keys)
shortsmash batch food --count 5           # turn the top 5 trends into 5 videos
shortsmash serve                          # 🆕 web studio: http://localhost:8000
shortsmash agent "make a 30s reel about coffee and post it Friday at 6pm"
shortsmash post myvideo.mp4 --caption     # post YOUR video: AI title + hashtags
shortsmash post myvideo.mp4 --at "Friday 6pm" --platforms youtube,tiktok

git clone https://github.com/hydope/shortsmash && cd shortsmash
./install.sh                          # Windows: .\install.ps1
shortsmash "why you can't tickle yourself"   # prompt in, finished short out

🏆 Featured in

ShortSmash is listed in curated awesome lists (merged PRs):

• ToolkitlyAI/awesome-ai-tools — AI Video
• TensorBlock/awesome-mcp-servers — MCP registry profile live on tensorblock.co
• sajadh76/awesome-AI-tools — Video Generation
• mcpHQ/awesome-mcp-servers — MCP Servers
• Jenqyang/Awesome-AI-Agents — AI Agents
• Official MCP Registry — io.github.hydope/shortsmash, installable via pip install shortsmash

🏗️ Architecture

flowchart LR
    P["Prompt / trend"] --> LLM["LLM: script + shot plan<br/>(NVIDIA · Gemini · Grok)"]
    LLM --> TTS["Neural TTS<br/>(50 languages)"]
    LLM --> VIS["Visuals<br/>(Pixabay · Agnes · Veo 3.1 · Kling)"]
    VIS --> GATE["Vision gate<br/>(CLIP + Gemini)"]
    GATE -->|reject| VIS
    TTS --> REN["FFmpeg render<br/>1080×1920 · karaoke captions<br/>cinematic grade · music"]
    GATE --> REN
    REN --> DUB["Dub engine<br/>(50 languages)"]
    REN --> PUB["10 publishers<br/>(official APIs)"]
    DUB --> PUB
    PUB --> SCHED["Scheduler<br/>(SQLite · 'Friday 6pm')"]

🖥️ ShortSmash Studio (web UI)

shortsmash serve launches a dark, fast studio in your browser — no build step:

• 🎬 Studio tab — type a topic, hit Smash, watch it build; video previews inline
• 📈 Trends tab — browse what's hot per niche, click any trend to use it as your topic
• 📚 Library tab — every project, video preview, one-click publish
• 📤 Manual posts — upload your own video, get a pre-flight check (resolution, duration, per-platform limits), AI-written title + hashtags, then post now or schedule it ("Friday 6pm") to 10 platforms
• 📊 Stats tab — your output at a glance

🎬 Demo

Made end-to-end by ShortSmash — no hand-picked clips, no human editing. LLM script, neural voice, CLIP-verified stock footage, karaoke captions, ducked music bed.

"How Goats Made You Addicted to Coffee" — 49s, 1080×1920, made from one prompt. Click to play:

Same video, re-voiced — native neural voices, same verified footage:

Español · اردو · Roman Urdu · 中文 — the Mandarin version uses a native voice (not translationese) with Hanzi karaoke captions. One project, every audience.

More demos — each made from a single prompt, click to play:

Why you can't tickle yourself — 11s, 1080×1920

The deepest place on Earth — 14s, 1080×1920

Why time flies faster as you get older — 11s, 1080×1920

📤 Or skip the AI — post your own video

Upload any video, get a pre-flight check (resolution, duration, per-platform limits), an AI-written title + hashtags, then post now or schedule it ("Friday 6pm") to 10 platforms. In the Studio's Publish tab, or one command: shortsmash post myvideo.mp4 --caption

🖥️ ShortSmash Studio

shortsmash serve — generate, browse trends, publish, and track stats from the browser:

Studio (templates)	Settings (API keys)
Publish	Library
Trends	Stats
Lyrics mode	Auto pilot

Why ShortSmash

Most text-to-video tools assemble clips blindly — whatever the stock API returns first goes in. That's why automated shorts have the infamous "stock-footage look": a burger in a cooking tutorial, a parrot in a recipe video.

ShortSmash is the first open-source pipeline with eyes:

• Two-stage vision gate. Every candidate clip's middle frame is checked by a local CLIP model (offline, no quota, no cost) against 15 confuser categories — burgers, birds, houseplants, empty pans, citrus fruit — then by Gemini vision when quota allows. Wrong footage never ships.
• Audible gate. Renders with dead or missing audio fail instead of shipping.
• Never ships silent. A CC-licensed music library auto-downloads on first run; music is ducked under narration with a real FFmpeg sidechain.

The pipeline

prompt ──▶ script ──▶ voice ──▶ visuals ──▶ captions ──▶ render ──▶ publish
           NVIDIA     Edge-TTS   Pixabay      faster-     FFmpeg      official
           Gemini     Piper      Veo 3.1      whisper     1080x1920   APIs only
           Grok       (offline   Kling        karaoke     +faststart
           OpenAI-    neural)    Agnes
           compat     50 langs   CLIP-verified

• Script — NVIDIA NIM (free) → Gemini (free) → Grok → any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (OpenRouter, DeepSeek, local Ollama) → offline template. Writes a scroll-stopping script and a strict JSON edit plan, validated by pydantic. Second-person, punchy, 3–4s scenes.
• Voice — Edge-TTS → Piper offline neural → gTTS fallback chain. 50 dub languages with native voices, Urdu/Hindi/Arabic included.
• Visuals — free Pixabay footage or AI generation: Google Veo 3.1 (best quality, native audio), Kling AI (top-tier motion), Agnes AI (free tier) — every clip verified by the vision gate regardless of source. Prefer your own? Set visual_provider: custom with any command (ComfyUI, Replicate, MiniMax…).
• Captions — faster-whisper word timestamps → burned-in karaoke captions.
• Render — FFmpeg: 9:16 smart reframe, transitions, hook + CTA overlays, ducked music, H.264/AAC faststart.
• Publish — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Pinterest, X. Official APIs only — no Selenium, no scraping, nothing that gets accounts banned.
• Dub — shortsmash dub <slug> --lang ur re-voices any video in 50 languages — Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Portuguese and 42 more — plus ur-roman / hi-roman for Roman-script captions ("Tum kaise ho?") with the native neural voice. Urdu captions render in proper Nastaliq calligraphy, right-to-left, with the karaoke highlight tracking the spoken word. Same verified clips, new native narration.
• Analytics — shortsmash analytics pulls real views/likes/comments from YouTube's API. Numbers from the platform, not vanity metrics.
• Trends — shortsmash trends <niche> harvests Google News + Hacker News (free, no keys). shortsmash batch turns the top trends into videos unattended.
• Schedule — natural language ("Friday 6pm"), durable SQLite queue, retrying worker.
• Engage — pulls recent comments, drafts warm replies, you approve each one with a tap. Nothing posts itself.
• MCP server — python -m shortsmash.mcp_server exposes generate_video, get_trends, list_projects, project_status to Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP client.
• Resume — shortsmash resume <slug> picks up failed projects from the first incomplete stage instead of redoing everything.

How ShortSmash compares

	ShortSmash	MoneyPrinterTurbo	OpenPost	Postiz	ShortGPT
Prompt → finished short	✅	✅	❌ (manual editor)	❌	✅
Post your own video (validate + schedule)	✅	❌	✅	✅	❌
Footage verification	✅ CLIP + Gemini	❌	n/a	n/a	❌
Offline neural voice fallback	✅ Piper	❌	n/a	n/a	❌
Audio safety gate	✅	❌	n/a	n/a	❌
Trend harvesting (free, no keys)	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌
Batch production	✅	✅	❌	❌	❌
Karaoke word-level captions	✅	✅	✅	❌	✅
Official publishing APIs	✅ 10 platforms	⚠️ Selenium for YT	✅	✅	⚠️
Multi-language dubbing	✅ 50 languages (incl. Roman Urdu/Hindi, Chinese)	❌	❌	❌	✅
Real analytics pull	✅	❌	❌	✅	❌
Web UI	✅ Studio	✅	✅	✅	✅
MCP server	✅	❌	✅	✅	❌
Comment-reply drafts (human-approved)	✅	❌	❌	❌	❌
Resume failed projects	✅	❌	n/a	n/a	❌
License	MIT	MIT	AGPL/Commercial	MIT	MIT
$0 to run	✅	✅	self-host	✅	✅

MoneyPrinterTurbo (129K★) is the most mature; OpenPost is the best manual workspace. ShortSmash is the most engineered AI-native pipeline — the only one that checks its own work.

What ShortSmash will never do

No fake likes, comments, follows, shares, or stars. No botting, no "human-like" evasion of platform detection, no scraping or unofficial endpoints. That violates every platform's rules and gets accounts banned — and it doesn't work for real growth anyway. This boundary is architectural, not a policy note: the capability simply isn't in the codebase.

Quickstart — one command

Windows (PowerShell) — paste this one line, done. It installs Python, FFmpeg, Git if missing, sets everything up, and puts ShortSmash Studio on your Desktop + Start Menu:

& ([scriptblock]::Create((irm "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hydope/shortsmash/master/install.ps1")))

Windows (CMD) — same thing, one line in Command Prompt:

curl -L -o "%TEMP%\rf-install.cmd" "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hydope/shortsmash/master/install.cmd" && "%TEMP%\rf-install.cmd"

Linux / macOS / Git Bash (Windows) — one line, works everywhere including Git Bash on Windows:

curl -fsSL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hydope/shortsmash/master/install.sh" | bash

After install, launch ShortSmash Studio from the Start Menu / Desktop (Windows) or run shortsmash serve → open http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Prefer it manual? Download the repo and double-click install.bat (Windows) or run ./install.sh (Linux/macOS).

Cloning just for the code? The full repo is ~213 MB of demo videos — skip them with a sparse checkout:

git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --sparse https://github.com/hydope/shortsmash.git
git -C shortsmash sparse-checkout set shortsmash scripts fonts

If an earlier install failed halfway, delete the ShortSmash folder and re-run the one-liner.

Needs Python 3.11–3.13 and ffmpeg. The Windows one-line installers fetch both for you if missing — and if your machine already has Python 3.14, they install 3.13 (PowerShell) or 3.12 (CMD) side by side and use that instead, since 3.14 cannot build a working virtual environment yet. Installs fetch code only (~2 MB, no demo videos).

Make a video in the 🎬 Studio tab, then hit the 🚀 Publish tab to post it to 10 platforms (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Facebook, Facebook Page) in one click — with per-platform setup status and dry-run safety.

Manual install, if you prefer it piecemeal:

pip install 'shortsmash[ai,voice,captions,trends,vision,mcp,youtube,x,schedule]'
shortsmash init          # guided setup: keys, voice, defaults
shortsmash doctor        # verify every dependency

# Your first video (needs a free Pixabay key + any LLM key)
shortsmash new "coffee" --duration 30

# Ride the trends
shortsmash trends ai --limit 5
shortsmash batch ai --count 3

# Hands-free
shortsmash agent "make a 30s reel about the top AI trend and post it Friday at 6pm"

Free keys: Pixabay (footage) · Google AI Studio (Gemini LLM) · NVIDIA NIM (LLM). Or point openai_base_url at local Ollama and pay nothing at all.

Docs

Per-platform publishing setup (official APIs):

• docs/setup-youtube.md, setup-tiktok.md, setup-instagram.md, setup-x.md
• docs/setup-threads.md, setup-bluesky.md, setup-linkedin.md, setup-pinterest.md, setup-facebook.md, setup-facebook_page.md
• docs/trends.md — trend sources and scoring
• docs/mcp.md — MCP server setup for Claude Code / Cursor
• docs/visual-providers.md — plugging in AI visual generation

License

MIT — build whatever you want.