A native video editor for Linux.

Website · Download 0.3.4 · Discussions

Edit on a magnetic timeline, grade in scene-linear colour, and automate workflows with local AI tools and an MCP-compatible assistant.

Early release · Vulkan GPU required · Arch package or source · GPL-3.0-only

Klipp is still young, but it works end to end: import, edit, grade, titles, sound and export. Keep copies of work you care about: the project format can still change between 0.x releases. Broad plugin compatibility, reliability hardening, and AMD/Intel GPU validation are ongoing. The latest release, 0.3.4, is out as signed Arch packages for x86_64 and aarch64.

Colour page · Titles · Sound · Edit by transcript · Showcase film · Media credits

Klipp is Swedish for “cut”.

Create, finish, deliver

• Edit: magnetic multitrack editing, ripple and insert edits, synced multicam, a selects timeline, transitions, speed ramps and optical-flow slow motion, stretching a clip to a new length, a curve editor for keyframes, and transcript-based cuts. Auditions keep several takes in one clip slot and play each in place; hover over an effect, transition or title to preview it on the clip; reuse markers show footage used twice.
• Picture: one node graph per clip for effects, mattes, keys, transforms, LUTs and OFX/frei0r plug-ins, composited on the GPU.
• Grade: a scene-linear ACEScg pipeline, camera-log decoding, colour wheels and curves, RGB and 3D qualifiers, a grade library shared across projects, GPU scopes, and SDR/HDR delivery including HDR10+.
• Titles: OpenType text with complex scripts, vertical text, variable and colour fonts, animators and per-glyph motions, extruded 3D text, rolling credits, spell checking against your system's dictionaries, and a template library with ready-made looks such as Glow Caps.
• Mix: multitrack audio with recorded track automation, aux buses and sends, EQ and dynamics, voice isolation, loudness and true-peak delivery, and dual-system sound sync.
• Captions: SRT, VTT, ASS, IMSC/TTML, SCC and EBU-STL in and out, captions embedded as CEA-608, and on-device translation.
• Deliver: start a project from a destination (YouTube, Shorts/Reels/TikTok, a square post or a podcast) that sets its size, loudness, captions and delivery check; outline a platform's player in the viewer; keep your logo, fonts, intro and outro as a brand kit.
• Play heavy work smoothly: freeze a heavy track to play it from a stored result, bounce it to a media file with its transparency, and let Klipp draw late frames ahead while you're idle.
• Automate: analyse footage, propose an edit plan, assemble a sequence, check it, and export through the control socket and an MCP server with 145 tools.
• Exchange: move an edit to and from other editors as OTIO, FCPXML, EDL or AAF (through OpenTimelineIO), import FCP7 XML and MLT, and export Kdenlive. The edit comes across (clips, cuts and timing, and markers where the format has them); grades, most effects and most titles don't, and every import lists what it carried and what it left out. Your own work is saved as a .klipp project.

Explore the feature reference and user guide.

How it is built and tested

Klipp is written in Rust as a 45-crate workspace. Pictures are processed on the GPU through Vulkan, with a CPU path kept as a reference to check the GPU against. ARCHITECTURE.md maps the crates, the threading model, the main subsystems, and where things tend to break.

• Over 8,000 automated tests across 39 crates; run one crate's with cargo test -p <crate>.
• CPU/GPU parity tests render the same frames both ways and compare the pixels, for effects, transitions, keys, grades and the compositor.
• A golden corpus of small projects is drawn through every render path and compared.
• Colour is checked against independent references: the ACES 1.3 output transforms against OpenColorIO, and the camera log curves against OpenColorIO and colour-science across all 1024 10-bit code values.
• The release package is built and test-installed in clean Arch containers.

Try Klipp

The primary target is x86_64 Arch Linux and Arch-based distributions with a working Vulkan driver. A Vulkan 1.1 GPU is required; integrated GPUs are supported in principle, with broader hardware validation ongoing. Other distributions are less tested. Arch Linux ARM on aarch64, including Apple Silicon under Asahi Linux, has its own package and is tested on an M1.

To install it, download klipp-0.3.4-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst (on aarch64, klipp-0.3.4-1-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz), SHA256SUMS and SHA256SUMS.minisig from the release page, then check the signature and install:

sudo pacman -S --needed minisign
minisign -Vm SHA256SUMS -P RWTo4I7A4g6VVGz6+mMUh6yQBtX+bdtyftItQmb1Kxf/rtUrNeGAXBvM
sha256sum -c --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS
sudo pacman -U klipp-0.3.4-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst

The minisign line must end with Trusted comment: klipp 0.3.4.

Later versions install from Klipp itself: Help → About Klipp → Check for updates downloads the new package and installs it only when its signature checks out.

To build the latest code from source instead:

sudo pacman -Syu --needed base-devel git
git clone https://github.com/davidkodar/klipp.git
cd klipp/packaging
makepkg -si
klipp

Run makepkg as your normal user. If prompted for an ONNX Runtime provider, choose onnxruntime-cpu for the standard setup; NVIDIA/CUDA acceleration is optional. The first build needs substantial time and disk space. AI models download on demand.

See the installation guide for driver checks, updates, removal, and troubleshooting. Ubuntu, Fedora and other distributions have no package yet; build from source with Building. They are less tested.

Local AI and external assistants

Klipp’s built-in transcription, vision, narration, and speech-enhancement models run on your machine. Models download when needed, and AI features can be disabled in Preferences.

The klipp-mcp server lets an external assistant work with a running Klipp instance. That assistant may use a local or cloud model, depending on your MCP client and its settings. Connecting an external assistant is separate from Klipp’s local inference.

Read about the assistant workflow, models and licences, and optional online sound libraries.

Plugins

Compatibility depends on the plugin and the host features it requires. These hosts implement subsets of the formats; broad automated compatibility testing is in progress. VST2 and VST3 are not supported.

Documentation and development

• Quick start
• User guide
• Build instructions
• Architecture
• Detailed features and credits

The documentation is an mdBook: run mdbook serve docs --open to read it locally.

Questions, help and ideas belong in Discussions; issues are for bugs. Issues and pull requests are welcome. Read CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md. Open an issue before non-trivial work and sign off commits under your own name. scripts/install-hooks.sh installs a pre-push hook that checks sign-offs and runs clippy and the affected crates' tests on your machine; GPU tests need a working GPU to mean anything.

Report security concerns through SECURITY.md.

Licence and credits

Klipp is licensed under GPL-3.0-only. Bundled assets and downloaded models retain their respective licences; see third-party credits and model licences.