Self Promotion Video Browser – a free tool for browsing, trimming and de-duplicating big video folders (Windows, Mac in testing)

[Operator3750]

This is something I had Claude make to make my own gooning easier. I find it especially useful for cam downloads, but just overall browsing as well. Screenshots and the program are at [Login or Register to view]

TL;DR: Video Browser is a free desktop program for big folders of videos. It shows stills from inside each video, finds duplicates (even renamed, re-encoded or shortened copies), cuts parts out without losing quality, repairs damaged files and makes contact-sheet collages. It keeps no record of your videos. All the code is open to read, and you can do anything with it (MIT No Attribution license). I made it with Claude Code (an AI coding assistant). To install, unzip it and double-click the starter; it sets itself up the first time. It’s tested on Windows, and the Mac version is still in beta. Suggestions and bug reports are welcome!

Download and screenshots: [Login or Register to view]

I built a desktop program for a problem I had: thousands of long recordings (often 3–7 hours each) with no quick way to see what’s in them, find the duplicates or cut out the parts I didn’t need. It’s free, and I’d love for people to try it.

• See inside a video at a glance. Click a video and you get a scrolling gallery of stills from start to end, each with its time. You can make the stills bigger or smaller and choose how far apart they are.
• Folder view. Open a folder and you get one picture per video, so you can tell recordings apart without playing them.
• A detailed list. Each video’s length, size and date, sortable. There’s a filter box, and you can type a name to jump to it.
• Find duplicates. It compares what’s actually in the videos, not just the file names, so it finds copies even when they’ve been renamed or re-encoded. It also finds shortened copies, and clips cut out of the middle of a longer recording. It compares picture quality and suggests the copy that looks best, not just the biggest file. You can compare copies side by side, and anything you remove goes to the Recycle Bin / Trash, so you can get it back.
• Cut out parts without re-encoding. Mark the parts you don’t want right on the stills and save a cut copy (MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM). Most of the video is copied exactly, so it’s fast and there’s no loss in quality. Cuts can land on the exact frame you picked. Every cut copy is checked against the original before you decide whether to replace it.
• Check and repair damaged videos. If a video looks damaged it tells you, and it can make a repaired copy.
• Collages / contact sheets. Save a single JPEG of a video’s stills with the video’s details at the top, or make one for every video in a folder.
• Move, rename and delete. You can also drag videos between folders. Moves to another drive are checked before the original is removed.
• Privacy-minded. It keeps no record of your videos: no recent files, no last folder, and the stills it caches are scrambled on disk and deleted when you close it. A “Privacy check” button shows how many records of your videos Windows and your video players keep, as numbers only, and can clear them.
• Its own folder window, instead of File Explorer’s. The standard Windows “Open folder” window (and the Mac’s Finder one) quietly keeps a history of every folder you choose in it, so your PC ends up with a list of where your videos are. Video Browser has its own folder window instead, which remembers nothing. It still shows your pinned folders, standard folders (Desktop, Videos…) and drives, and it has a filter box.
• Built-in help. “How to use…” (or F1) explains everything, and hovering over a button tells you what it does.

Nothing is hidden or compiled, and it’s under a very permissive license (see below). The whole program is one readable Python file (video_browser.py), and the starters are plain scripts you can open in any text editor. Feel free to read through it, check what it does, or poke holes in it. Apart from the first-time setup (and installing a video player if you ask it to), it doesn’t connect to the internet.

I’m not a programmer. I built this with Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant: I described what I wanted, made the design decisions, and tested every version. Claude wrote the code. Along the way it also wrote a large set of automated tests that run on every version, and the code went through several AI-run multi-agent code reviews, each followed by a round of fixes. That’s part of why I’m sharing the source: more human eyes on it are welcome.

1. Download the zip from [Login or Register to view]
2. Unzip it anywhere you like.
3. Start it:
   • Windows: double-click Start Video Browser (Windows).bat
   • Mac: double-click the Video Browser app

That’s it. Nothing needs installing by hand. The first start sets itself up: if you don’t have Python it installs it (on Windows just for your user, with no password; on a Mac it asks first and needs your password), then it downloads the libraries it needs (about 100 MB). This needs the internet the first time and takes a few minutes. After that it starts quickly.

First-time warnings (normal for free programs that aren’t from a big company):

• Windows may say “Windows protected your PC”. Click More info, then Run anyway.
• Mac may say it can’t check the app for harmful software. Go to System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll down, click Open Anyway, then open it again.

To remove it later, use the Clean up / uninstall button inside the program, then delete the folder.

I build and test it on Windows 11. An earlier version was tested on a Mac and worked, but the latest version hasn’t been fully tested on macOS yet, so please treat the Mac version as a beta. If you’re on a Mac, I’d especially like to hear how it goes.

If you have ideas for features or improvements, or something that would make it more useful for how you work, please let me know here.

Please tell me! The most helpful thing to include:

• What you were doing and what happened.
• If a problem message appeared, its Copy details button. If not, About… › Copy (it copies your system details).

Neither of these includes the names of your videos or folders, so they’re safe to paste here.

Video Browser is released under the MIT No Attribution license: anyone can use, copy, change and share it, for any purpose, without asking. It comes as is, without any warranty: I’m not responsible for anything that happens from using it. It moves, cuts and deletes files only when you tell it to, and asks first, but please keep backups of videos that matter. The full text is in LICENSE.txt in the zip, and in the program under About… › License….

Thanks for trying it!