Kinocut is a local-first, Apache-2.0 video editing MCP server that wraps FFmpeg in typed tools with preflight guardrails, Video Receipts, and quality/release checkpoints, letting AI agents trim, caption, repurpose, and quality-gate media on the local machine. Its clear strengths are being free, account-free, and local so media stays on the user's machine, with an emphasis on inspectable, traceable outputs; the trade-offs are the local FFmpeg requirement (plus Node.js and large optional extras for some features) and the explicit expectation that a human reviews audio and video before publishing. Several README surfaces are labeled unreleased or gated, so check the version and status notes before relying on them.
Kinocut (formerly mcp-video) is a free, open-source, local-first Model Context Protocol server, Python library, and kino CLI. It wraps FFmpeg (plus optional Hyperframes and Whisper extras) in typed tools with preflight guardrails, Video Receipt provenance, and quality/release checkpoints, so agents can trim, caption, repurpose, and quality-gate local video media instead of inventing FFmpeg flags. Per the MCP manifest it ships as the PyPI package kinocut over stdio (uvx --from kinocut kino) under Apache-2.0. The README states published 1.15.1 documents 196 MCP tools and 167 CLI commands, while the development tip registers 201 MCP tools and 172 CLI commands. No Kinocut account or API key is needed for the core surface and media is not uploaded to a Kinocut cloud, but FFmpeg must be installed and on PATH. Note: the repository contains 2 MCP servers; this profile covers only the server at server.json.
{
"mcpServers": {
"kinocut": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["--from", "kinocut", "kino"]
}
}
}