Reel

An MCP server that turns a video into text, on this Mac.

Point it at any video ffmpeg can read. It extracts the sound, splits it on silence when the video is long, has utt transcribe each piece on-device, and hands the stitched transcript back to whichever assistant asked. Reel also appears as a settings page inside utt, listing the videos it has transcribed.

Requirements

Bun
ffmpeg and ffprobe (brew install ffmpeg)
utt, running

Install

bun install
just install-page   # draw the settings page inside utt
just register       # make the tools available to every Claude Code session

Tools

Tool	What it does
`transcribe_video`	`path`, optional `hints`, `timestamps`, `wait_seconds`. Returns the transcript, or a `job_id` when it takes longer than you waited.
`transcribe_status`	`job_id`, optional `wait_seconds`. Picks up a transcript that was still being worked on.

hints are words a recogniser tends to get wrong — names, products, repos. Near misses are corrected to them.

Settings, inside utt

Let assistants turn video into text — the switch that turns every request away.
Keep a list of the videos — what the page shows.
Save the words beside the video — leaves a .txt next to each file.

Common commands

Command	Description
`just check`	Format, lint, typecheck, tests
`just install-page`	Write the plugin manifest into utt
`just register`	Add the MCP server to every Claude Code session