Feather

Make videos, images, GIFs and PDFs lighter — entirely on your device.

Feather is a fast, open-source media compressor for macOS (Windows & Linux builds coming). Drop files in, pick a quality, get smaller files. Nothing is uploaded, ever.

Download

Easiest — one line in Terminal (downloads the latest release, installs to Applications, and grants it access to open):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FirasLatrech/feather/main/install.sh | sh

Or grab the .dmg from the latest release →. Feather isn't notarized yet (it's open source, not signed by a paid Apple developer account), so if you install the dmg by hand macOS says "Feather is damaged" — it isn't; run xattr -cr /Applications/Feather.app once and open it.

FFmpeg is downloaded by Feather itself on first launch if you don't have it. Ghostscript (PDF only) can be installed from Settings.

Related MCP server: ffmpeg-mcp

Features

• Video — H.264 / H.265 / VP9 / AV1, hardware encoding (Apple VideoToolbox) always on, target file size, resize, frame rate, trim, remove audio, video → GIF, extract MP3. Bitrate-aware: never spends more bits than the source.

• Images — JPG (mozjpeg), PNG (oxipng), WebP, AVIF, HEIC/TIFF input, resize, keep metadata. Never produces a larger file.

• GIF — per-file palette + dithering, resize, fps.

• PDF — Ghostscript presets from print quality to screen.

• Batch with bounded parallelism, live speed × / ETA, size & time estimates before you press Compress.

• Auto-compress: watch folders (e.g. Downloads) and compress whatever lands there; optionally replace the original.

• Per-file setting overrides, output folder / naming templates, replace-in-place, move to Trash, keep dates.

• History with stats, notifications, light/dark theme.

CLI & MCP (AI agents)

Feather ships feather-cli inside the app bundle (Feather.app/Contents/MacOS/feather-cli) — a command-line tool and an MCP server, so Claude, Cursor or any MCP client can compress files on your machine.

# Terminal
feather-cli compress ~/Movies/*.mp4 --quality good --max 1920
feather-cli compress photo.heic --format webp --out ~/Desktop
feather-cli probe video.mov · feather-cli estimate *.png --quality medium · feather-cli history

# Claude Code
claude mcp add feather -- /Applications/Feather.app/Contents/MacOS/feather-cli mcp

# Claude Desktop / Cursor (mcp.json)
{ "mcpServers": { "feather": { "command": "/Applications/Feather.app/Contents/MacOS/feather-cli", "args": ["mcp"] } } }

MCP tools: compress (paths, quality, format, max, out, replace, no_audio, codec, target_mb — with progress notifications), probe, estimate, history. Destructive options (replace) are only applied when passed explicitly. Settings → AI agents · MCP shows the exact commands with copy buttons.

Requirements

• macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon or Intel)

• FFmpeg — brew install ffmpeg

• Ghostscript for PDFs (optional) — brew install ghostscript

Development

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev          # desktop app
pnpm dev                # UI only, in the browser with a mocked backend (add ?demo=files)
cd src-tauri && FEATHER_SAMPLES=/path/to/samples cargo test   # engine tests against real ffmpeg/gs

Stack: Tauri 2 (Rust) · React · TypeScript · Vite. Engine: FFmpeg for video/GIF, Ghostscript for PDF, pure-Rust image codecs (image, mozjpeg, oxipng, webp, ravif).

Screenshots

Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome. Run pnpm tauri dev for the app, pnpm dev for the UI in a browser (mock backend, ?demo=files|running|done), and cargo test in src-tauri (set FEATHER_SAMPLES to a folder with sample media to run the encoder tests).

Roadmap

See PLAN.md.

License

MIT © Firas Latrach