14.9k stars · MIT · v2.2.1 (2025-05-21) · Track this in Scout
Programmatic video editing in Python — batch intros, burned-in subtitles, format conversion.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
MoviePy is a Python library for cutting, joining, compositing and exporting video. It wraps FFmpeg, the standard tool for moving video between formats, and adds text, images, transitions and effects as objects you can put together in code.
What it is good for. Repetitive video work of any kind: putting the same intro on every episode, burning subtitles into a batch of clips, cutting a long recording into sections at known timestamps, or producing five sizes of the same video for five places.
- The edit becomes a file you can keep, read and change, so next month's batch is one command rather than an afternoon.
- MIT licence, and code last landed on 26 August 2026.
- Version 2 is a substantial rewrite, so the current interface is cleaner than the tutorials written for version 1.
- Version 2 changed a lot. Almost every older example on the internet is written for version 1 and will not run without edits.
- It is slow on long videos, because every frame passes through Python. A straight format conversion is faster done with FFmpeg directly.
- The last release is v2.2.1, dated 21 May 2025, sixteen months ago, although code has kept landing since.
mifi/lossless-cut43,741 stars, a desktop application for cutting and joining without re-encoding; much faster and much better for one file at a time.
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WyattBlue/auto-editor5,355 stars, covered in Edition 2; it removes silence and unwanted sections automatically rather than letting you describe an edit.
Track this in Scout- kkroening/ffmpeg-python
11,008 stars, thin Python bindings around FFmpeg; its last code landed on 4 August 2024, twenty-five months ago.
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python3 -m venv venv source venv/bin/activate pip install moviepy # ffmpeg must also be installed, e.g. sudo apt install ffmpeg # Debian/Ubuntu brew install ffmpeg # macOS
