FlipperClipper 🦭

Flip it, clip it, ship it. FinFetcher's sibling: a small Windows video editor for the edit you make right before you send someone a clip. Open a video, trim it, crop it, speed it up or slow it down, reverse it, tweak the volume — then export it as a video, a GIF, or just the audio. That is the whole app.

There are no project files, no timeline of multiple clips, and nothing to save. Open, edit, export, done.

Built with Tauri 2 — a Rust shell around a WebView2 UI, so the download is small and it starts instantly. Preview playback is the browser's own hardware-accelerated decoder, so scrubbing, trimming and speed changes never re-encode anything; FFmpeg reads the file when you open it, paints the filmstrip under the timeline, and does the export.

Install

Download FlipperClipper-Setup.exe from Releases and run it. It installs for you alone into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\FlipperClipper and never asks for admin rights.

Updates

The app checks for new releases on launch and can update itself in place. The check talks to GitHub's public API anonymously — it carries no token and no account. That has one consequence worth knowing while this repository is private: an anonymous request to a private repository gets a 404, so installed copies cannot see releases until the repository is public. The moment it is, the same builds start updating themselves with no change on their end.

The controls

• Open — the Open button, Ctrl + O, dropping a file onto the window, or the command line (FlipperClipper.exe "C:\clips\holiday.mp4").
• Trim — drag the in/out handles on the timeline, or set them with I and O at the playhead.
• Timeline zoom — scroll the mouse wheel over the timeline, or use the zoom in / zoom out / fit buttons beside it.
• Speed — the slider covers 0.25×–8× with notches at the useful stops; type into the number box for anything from 0.05× to 20×.
• Reverse — plays and exports the clip backwards. Audio reverses with it.
• Volume — 0–200%. A boost above 100% is applied in the export; the preview player cannot play louder than full volume, so you hear the boost in the exported file.
• Crop, mute — as ever: C to enter crop mode, M to mute.
• Format — a dropdown with mp4, mkv, mov, webm and gif, plus an audio-only toggle that swaps the list for mp3, m4a, wav, flac, ogg and opus and exports just the sound.
• Quality — high / balanced / small, or fit, which takes a target size in MB (typed, not picked from a preset) and aims the export at it. Fit cannot work for GIF or for the uncompressed and lossless audio formats (wav, flac), and the app refuses those combinations rather than guessing.

FFmpeg

FlipperClipper needs FFmpeg on your PATH: ffprobe reads a video's details the moment you open one, and ffmpeg does the export. It is not bundled — an FFmpeg build dwarfs the app, and paying for it in every download would be paying for something many people already have. A system install also stays up to date on its own.

If it is missing, the app shows a banner with a one-click install button that runs:

winget install -e --id Gyan.FFmpeg

You can also install it yourself, any way you like, as long as ffmpeg and ffprobe end up on PATH.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Does
Space	Play / pause
← / →	Step one frame
Shift + ← / →	Jump one second
I / O	Set the in / out point at the playhead
Home / End	Jump to the in / out point
M	Mute (when the clip has audio)
R	Reverse
C	Crop mode — press again to apply the crop
Enter	Apply the crop, in crop mode
Ctrl + O	Open a video
Ctrl + E	Export
Esc	Leave crop mode, close the export options, or dismiss a message

The mouse wheel zooms the timeline under the pointer; the zoom buttons next to it do the same in steps, and the fit button brings the whole clip back into view.

A running export is stopped with the Cancel button next to the progress bar, not with Esc.

Building locally

Needs Node 20+, a stable Rust toolchain (stable-msvc), and the Visual Studio C++ build tools.

npm install
npm run tauri dev     # run it

To produce a real installer, double-click build exe.bat. It builds the release exe, finds Inno Setup, and leaves FlipperClipper-Setup.exe in your Downloads folder. If Inno Setup is missing it tells you how to install it (winget install -e --id JRSoftware.InnoSetup) and points you at the app exe, which is built and runnable either way.

Releases

package.json's version field is the single source of truth — tauri.conf.json reads it, scripts/vernum.mjs derives the four-number Windows form from it, and the installer is handed both.

A release is cut by pushing a tag:

git tag v0.2.0 && git push origin v0.2.0

.github/workflows/build-release.yml then writes the tag's version into package.json (the tag is the authority for what a build is), builds, packages the installer, and publishes a GitHub Release with FlipperClipper-Setup.exe attached. A tag containing a hyphen — v0.2.0-beta — is published as a pre-release, and only pre-release builds are offered pre-release updates.

Pushing to a feature/** or bugfix/** branch runs .github/workflows/build-test.yml, which produces the same installer as a 30-day workflow artifact without publishing anything.

Licence

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.