<div align="center"> <picture> <source media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)" srcset="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Chamanrajragu/purffle-shorts/main/docs/logo-dark.svg"> <img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Chamanrajragu/purffle-shorts/main/docs/logo.svg" alt="PurffleShorts" width="300"> </picture>

PurffleShorts — Free AI YouTube Shorts Generator, Faceless Video Maker & Opus Clip Alternative

English · 简体中文 · Español · Português · हिन्दी · 日本語

An open-source AI video generator for YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Instagram Reels. Give it a topic, a web page, a Reddit post or a long podcast, and it makes finished vertical videos (script, voiceover, footage, captions, sound effects), then uploads or schedules them on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.<br> YouTube automation in Python that runs on your own computer. The AI model you choose writes the script (GPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama through Ollama, DeepSeek, Grok, Mistral or any OpenAI-compatible API), using the phrases people actually search for on YouTube, and a second AI pass grades and rewrites it. Free neural voices read it, and stock footage, AI images or your own gameplay video fill the screen. Captions appear word by word, with key words in colour and an emoji per scene. It makes Reddit story videos, fake text message videos and two-voice dialogues, and clips podcasts into Shorts with jump cuts and face tracking. Free, MIT-licensed, no watermark. It also works from Claude Desktop, Claude Code and Cursor through MCP.

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Features · Quick start · Colab · Formats · Reddit & gameplay · Clip podcasts · SEO · AI models · Voices · Publishing · Studio · API · MCP · Compare · FAQ

<img src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Chamanrajragu/purffle-shorts/main/docs/hero.gif" alt="Three Shorts made by PurffleShorts playing side by side: a facts video about flamingos with word-highlighted captions, a two-voice dialogue about octopuses with speaker name tags, and a text-message story on an animated phone screen" width="770">

_{Real output, no editing: <code>examples/flamingos.json</code>, <code>examples/dialogue.json</code> and <code>examples/chat-story.json</code> rendered with <code>make --script</code>.<br> Free Microsoft neural voices, AI images from Pollinations (for the octopus videos they were downloaded one by one into a local folder first, because keyless Pollinations now allows about one image every few minutes). GIFs have no sound.}

Try it with no API keys and no sign-up (needs uv):

uvx --from git+https://github.com/Chamanrajragu/purffle-shorts purffle-shorts demo --style chat

…or open it in Google Colab and make videos in your browser, with nothing to install.

⭐ If PurffleShorts saves you time, a star helps other creators find it.  ·  🌐 purffle.com/purffle-shorts

<!-- mcp-name: io.github.Chamanrajragu/purffle-shorts --> </div>

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🤖 What is PurffleShorts?

PurffleShorts is a YouTube Shorts automation tool for faceless channels. Start it and it keeps going: fresh topic, retention-focused script that a second AI pass reviews and tightens, natural AI voiceover, relevant footage, captions synced to each spoken word, sound effects, a polished render, and an upload or scheduled release. It stays inside YouTube's daily API quota.

Beyond the autopilot, it is a small studio:

• Draft a script and edit any line before rendering.
• Make two-voice dialogues, text-message stories and Reddit-style stories, over stock footage or your own gameplay background.
• Turn an article or a Reddit post into a Short.
• Clip a podcast into Shorts, an Opus Clip-style workflow that runs on your computer, with jump cuts, punch-in zoom and face tracking.
• Publish the same video in several languages, and plan a week of ideas from what people search for on YouTube.
• Let the channel's own view counts steer new scripts.

It is made for content creators, faceless YouTube channels, educators and marketers who want short-form video at volume without editing by hand. It runs on your own computer (macOS, Windows, Linux), in Docker or in Google Colab. You pick every model, and the same video can go to TikTok and Instagram Reels as well as YouTube.

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🎯 Use cases

• A faceless channel on autopilot. Pick a niche (space, history, animals, money tips), set three publish times a day and leave it running. Ideas come from real YouTube searches, Trends, Wikipedia, Reddit, RSS or your list, and are never reused. The AI is told to avoid your recent titles, and every script is reviewed before it is voiced.
• Reddit story videos over gameplay. The AI writes a first-person post, a narrator reads it over a post card, and your Minecraft parkour or other gameplay clip plays underneath: full screen, or split screen with footage on top. A real Reddit post link works as the source too.
• Fake text message videos for Shorts, TikTok and Reels: the AI writes a fictional chat, two voices read it, and the phone screen is animated with a pop as each message lands.
• Podcast, interview and stream clips. clip episode.mp4 --count 5 transcribes the video and lets the AI pick the moments that stand on their own (or the ones matching your brief, such as "the funniest bits"). You get captioned vertical clips with pauses and ums removed, the speaker kept in frame and a virality score each. There are no per-minute fees.
• Articles, blog posts and notes into video. make --url https://… or --from-file notes.md turns your own writing into a Short.
• One idea, many languages. --also-lang es,hi,pt publishes the same video with native voices in each language. LOCALIZE_METADATA translates the title and description of every upload.
• Education and explainers. Quiz, myth-vs-fact, explainer and dialogue formats, in 9:16 for Shorts or 16:9 for regular YouTube.
• Automations and AI assistants. Drive it from n8n, Zapier or cron through the REST API, or ask Claude or Cursor to make, clip or upload videos through MCP.

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✨ Features

AI scriptwriting

• One structured LLM call returns the whole Short: hook, scenes, a footage search, an image prompt, key words and an emoji per scene, title, description, hashtags, tags and YouTube category.
• Script Doctor: a second AI pass grades the draft on six points (hook, curiosity, pacing, specificity, payoff, accuracy), lists what is weak and rewrites it. The rewrite is graded again and only kept if it scores at least as well, so the 0–100 retention score always belongs to the script you actually get. Automatic checks (hook length, filler words, missing call to action, no concrete numbers) feed the review.
• Written for search: the phrases YouTube's own search box suggests for the topic are handed to the writer, so titles, descriptions and tags use the words people actually type.
• Strict JSON-schema replies on providers that support them (OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, Ollama, LM Studio, Claude), with an automatic step down for the ones that don't.
• 12 providers: OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Mistral, Together AI, xAI Grok, Ollama, LM Studio, or any OpenAI-compatible URL. List backups in LLM_FALLBACKS and they are tried in order if the main one fails.
• 11 formats: facts, story, listicle, myth-busting, quiz, explainer, motivational, news, two-voice dialogue, text-message story and Reddit-style story (a post card while the title is read, then the story with captions).
• Draft first and edit any line in the Studio, or write a script yourself and render it with --script, with no LLM call.

Sources

• Your niches, questions people search for on YouTube (TOPIC_SOURCES=search), Google Trends, Wikipedia "On this day", Reddit TIL, RSS feeds, your own list, any web page or Reddit post (--url) or document (--from-file).
• Content planner: the AI brainstorms a batch of specific, true, non-repeating ideas, guided by real YouTube searches, into a queue that the autopilot uses first.

Voiceover

• 320+ free Microsoft neural voices in 75 languages, with word-level timestamps. No key needed.
• Two speakers for dialogues and chat stories, each with their own voice, joined with natural pauses.
• One video, many languages: --also-lang es,hi adds translated copies that reuse the same footage.
• Also OpenAI TTS, ElevenLabs, Kokoro-82M, Coqui and the operating-system voice. Falls back to the free voice if a paid engine fails.

Footage & backgrounds

• A separate stock-footage search for every scene (Pexels, Pixabay). Each candidate is scored by how well its own description matches the scene, the search engine's ranking, shape and length; portrait clips preferred, never reused across videos.
• Gameplay and background videos (BACKGROUND_VIDEO): one continuous stretch of your Minecraft parkour, Subway Surfers or "satisfying" clip plays under the whole story, either full screen or split screen with the scene footage on top.
• Fast pacing: scenes longer than 4.5 s are cut into several shots with different footage, each cut placed on a natural pause between words.
• AI images per scene from OpenAI (gpt-image-1 / DALL·E 3) or Pollinations, or your own media/ folder. Ken Burn