REEL
REEL
VERSION 1.0
Reel is one native app for all your media — it plays video and music, shows images, records your screen, converts between formats, and opens an editing timeline when you want more. Linux-first, free and open source.
Version 1.0.0 · x86_64 · install instructions
No separate player, converter, screenshot tool and recorder. They belong together.
Hardware-decoded playback with real A/V sync, subtitles, frame-exact seek and live scrubbing — powered by libmpv when present. mpv/VLC keyboard muscle-memory works out of the box.
Audio plays with cover art or gnarly visualizers — musical spectrum, spectrogram, vectorscope, waveform — rendered by the playback engine itself. Press V to cycle.
Stills open in the same window — ultrawide screenshots, 8K photos, and SVG, rasterized crisply. Convert to PNG, JPEG or WebP with resize in two clicks.
H.264, H.265, AV1, VP9 with quality presets or custom CRF; instant lossless remux; audio extraction to MP3/FLAC/Opus — straight from the player, no editing required. And when you've made a cut, export the edit itself — Reel renders your trims, splits and multiple source files into one new video, on the GPU encoder where your machine has one. One-click destinations — YouTube, TikTok, Reels, Instagram, Facebook, X — pick the frame, fit and codec for you.
Screenshot the full screen, a region or a window. Record your screen with system audio — no OBS, no external tools: Reel speaks your desktop's portal directly. Captures open in Reel, ready to trim or convert.
One button. Reel listens to the speech and writes the captions itself — locally, with no account, no upload and no per-minute billing. The speech engine and model are fetched automatically the first time (~85 MB, once); after that it works on a plane. Cues follow your edit: a line that spans a cut appears in both halves, and speech you trimmed away captions nowhere. What you see in the preview is exactly what burns into the export.
Everything the editor does, the command line does too, with no window at all:
reel add, reel captions, reel title add,
reel render --preset tiktok. Every command speaks --json, and
reel commands --json hands a machine the whole interface. Projects are plain
JSON files. Read the guide →
Heavy footage gets an automatic background editing proxy the preview scrubs instead, while exports always use the original — and HDR clips (HLG, HDR10) are detected and tone-mapped so they look right, not washed out. Nothing to configure, nothing to relink.
Timeline exports are drawn by Reel's GPU compositor frame by frame — ffmpeg only
encodes. What the preview shows is what renders, by construction. And because every
frame is composed live, parameters can move: keyframe exposure, colour, zoom, pan and
PiP placement, with linear, hold or eased curves — from the panel or
reel keyframe.
Check a box, pick the colour, done: a chroma key with soft edges and automatic despill that previews live — in the picture-in-picture inset too — and renders identically. Plus roll, slip and slide trims, live scopes while you grade, markers that become real MP4 chapters, and one-click frame export of the composed edit.
Drop a clip on the overlay track and drag it where you want it, right on the preview — the inset plays live while you place it. Position and size are fractions of the frame, so what you place is what renders, at any resolution.
Any clip from a quarter speed to four times, with the audio pitched to match and the clip's slot on the timeline resized to suit — so the rest of your cut stays exactly where you put it.
The audio is drawn right on the timeline, so you cut on a word instead of hunting for it. Peaks decode in the background and are cached per source — split, trim, move or duplicate a clip and the waveform is simply already there. Copy, paste and duplicate with Ctrl+C/V/D (pasting inserts, so it can never quietly eat what you already placed), and drop markers with Ctrl+M to jump between with Ctrl+←/→.
Add text, then drag it where you want it — right on the picture. Size, colour, bold, outline. Position is kept as a fraction of the frame, so a title composed against the preview lands in exactly the same spot whether you export at 720p or 4K.
Five-point tone curves per channel, baked with your LUT into one GPU sample. The transcribed caption list is editable in place. And one click queues a render for every platform at once — each at its own frame and loudness.
Limit any grade to an ellipse or rectangle — feathered, invertible, and keyframable, so the window can follow a subject across the shot. The colour goes where you point it; the rest of the frame stays honest.
Grade through any .cube 3D LUT — GPU-sampled, previewed exactly as rendered, never colouring the letterbox bars. And one checkbox smooths camera shake with a cached two-pass analysis whose test measures the shake actually halving.
A real transition library — crossfade, dip-to-black, wipes, slides —
previewed live with the exact geometry the render uses. Social presets deliver the mix at
−14 LUFS so platforms don't squash your audio. And
reel align syncs two takes by their sound alone — multicam
without clap sticks.
Tighten finds every silence in your edit, cuts it with breathing room around the
words, and closes the timeline up behind it — the podcast jump-cut pass in one
button (or reel tighten in a script). Undoable, like everything.
A volume trim per clip, and a music bed under the whole edit that ducks under speech automatically — and you hear it all live while you cut: the editor mixes every clip, fade and the ducked bed in real time. No volume curves, no keyframes: Reel rides the level for you, and hands it back the moment the talking stops.
Hit Edit and your file is on a multi-track timeline: trim by dragging clip edges, split at the playhead, move with snapping, undo/redo, and save the cut as a .reel project that reopens with a double-click. Compositing Give clips a look — exposure, contrast, saturation, fades — and see it live in the preview: the editor and the export share one formula, so what you watch is what renders. Crossfade between clips, reframe a landscape shot into a vertical one, and queue every platform at once.
One binary per platform. No installer wizard, no account, no telemetry.
One line — installs to ~/.local/bin and checks your codecs:
curl -fsSL https://reel.pixygon.io/install.sh | bashOr grab the tarball and put reel on your PATH yourself.
Add the Pixygon repo once, then it's a normal package with updates:
# /etc/pacman.conf
[pixygon]
SigLevel = Optional TrustAll
Server = https://pixygontech.b-cdn.net/releases/pacman-repo/x86_64sudo pacman -Sy reelUnzip anywhere and run reel.exe. If ffmpeg isn't on your machine,
Reel downloads its own private copy on first launch.
Every file has a published SHA-256 next to it (append .sha256 to any download URL).
Release history lives in the manifest.
Zero manual steps is the goal: dependencies install with Reel, and Reel offers to become your default player.
Reel plays best with libmpv (hardware decode, audio sync, subtitles, visualizers) and ffmpeg (convert & record). On Arch the package installs both automatically; the one-line installer offers to install them anywhere else; and if ffmpeg is still missing, Reel downloads its own private copy on first launch. No codec hunting.
On first launch Reel asks whether to open Video, Music and/or Images by default — tick what you want, done. From then on double-clicking a file opens it in Reel. Change your mind any time under ⚙ → Default apps; Reel always stays in your "Open with" menus either way.
reel video.mkv # play immediately
reel song.flac # music + visualizer
reel photo.svg # view imagesThe first screen recording shows your desktop's own "share screen" picker — approve it once and Reel remembers.
If you've used mpv or VLC, your hands already know Reel.
Open it → ⬇ Export → pick format & quality → Start. Live progress, cancellable, never overwrites. Works on video, audio and images alike.
Edit → Generate captions → wait a moment. The lines appear on the preview where they will burn in; drag the Size slider to taste, then export. Nothing leaves your machine.
Reel’s tray icon → Record → choose screen, window or region in the system picker → ⏹ Stop. The clip opens in Reel — trim it or convert it on the spot.
Reel’s tray icon → Screenshot → Full screen, Region or Window.
It opens in Reel immediately — export to JPEG/WebP or just find it in ~/Pictures/Reel.
Reel is MIT-licensed and developed in the open. Read it, fork it, ship it in something else — no strings.
About ten thousand lines of Rust: the player, the editor, the export engine, the capture path and the command line. No telemetry, no accounts, no phone-home — captions run on your own machine precisely so nothing has to leave it.
Bugs and ideas are welcome as issues; the architecture notes that guide the code live
in CLAUDE.md, and the roadmap is honest about what is and isn't done yet.
Every feature ships with a test that proves it against real ffmpeg output.
Reel is free and will stay free. If it saved you a subscription, you can help keep it moving — and starring the repo genuinely helps people find it.