Reel

Reel is an MCP server that lets your coding assistant transcribe any video on your Mac, on-device, through utt.

Point it at any file ffmpeg can read (mp4, mov, mkv, webm, avi and so on). Reel extracts the sound, splits long videos on silence so no sentence is cut in half, has utt transcribe each piece on your Mac, and hands one stitched transcript back to the assistant that asked.

Part of utt

Reel is an extension for utt. It needs utt installed and running, and it does no speech recognition of its own.

utt is one on-device speech-to-text app for the Mac. It runs Parakeet TDT v3 or Whisper, and nothing leaves the Mac. Extensions bring that one engine, with the model, vocabulary, replacements and cleanup you already chose, into the other tools you use. You install utt once and add an extension for each tool:

Download utt at utt.jurrejan.com/download. All extensions are listed at utt.jurrejan.com/extensions.

Related MCP server: video-to-llm

Requirements

• macOS 26 or later on Apple silicon

• utt, running

• Bun

• ffmpeg and ffprobe: brew install ffmpeg

Install

Reel is not on npm yet. Clone it and install its dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/doublej/reel.git
cd reel
bun install
just install-page   # draw Reel's settings page inside utt now

The settings page is also drawn the first time an assistant starts the server. It shows the exact config for your checkout, ready to copy.

Claude Code

claude mcp add --scope user reel -- bun /path/to/reel/src/index.ts

just register runs this command with the path of your checkout filled in.

OpenCode

Add Reel to the mcp block of your opencode.json:

{
  "mcp": {
    "reel": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["bun", "/path/to/reel/src/index.ts"],
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

Other MCP clients

Any client that runs local stdio servers, such as Claude Desktop or Cursor, takes the usual mcpServers entry:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "reel": {
      "command": "bun",
      "args": ["/path/to/reel/src/index.ts"]
    }
  }
}

If the client cannot find bun on its PATH, use the full path to it (which bun).

Tools

hints are words a recogniser tends to get wrong, such as names, products and repo names. Near misses are corrected to them.

timestamps adds a line per word under the transcript, as start end word in seconds from the start of the video. That is enough to cut the video on a word. The transcript then reads as the recogniser heard it, without utt's cleanup, so the words and the times describe the same thing.

wait_seconds defaults to 120. Jobs are kept in memory, so a job_id does not survive a restart of the session that started it.

Settings, inside utt

Reel has its own page in utt, under Extensions:

• Let assistants turn video into text: the off switch. When it is off, every request is turned away.

• Keep a list of the videos: the list of transcribed videos the page shows.

• Save the words beside the video: leaves a .txt file next to each video.

Privacy

Nothing is uploaded. Reel never opens a network connection. ffmpeg reads the video on your Mac, and utt transcribes the audio on your Mac. Reel hands audio to utt through files in utt's extensions folder, and keeps its own small history in ~/Library/Application Support/dev.jurrejan.reel/. utt's menu bar icon lights up in Reel's colour while it works on Reel's audio, so transcription never happens without you being able to see it.

Development

bun install
just check        # Justfile format, file sizes, Biome lint, tsc, bun test
bun src/index.ts  # run the server on stdio

Bun runs src/index.ts directly. There is no build step. See CLAUDE.md for how the code is laid out and the rules it keeps.

License

MIT © 2026 Jurre Jan