OpenShot Video Editor is a free, cross-platform, open-source video editor for Linux, Mac, and Windows, built for hobbyists, educators, and small production teams who want timeline-based editing and animation without a commercial subscription.

What it is

OpenShot is a desktop video editor written primarily in Python 3, with a Qt5 interface and a C++ engine split across the libopenshot and libopenshot-audio libraries. It sits in the Linux, Mac, and Windows desktop media ecosystem, and it relies on FFmpeg for the bulk of its format, codec, and rendering support. The project is organised as a set of repositories, with continuous integration running separately for openshot-qt, libopenshot, and libopenshot-audio, and distribution handled through pre-built installers from the project's website. It has accumulated 6509 stars and 805 forks, and the last push to the repository was on 2026-09-15.

The concrete problem it solves is paid, subscription-bound video editing. It is positioned in this registry as an open alternative to Adobe Premiere Pro, giving editors a full timeline toolset without a Creative Cloud account or a recurring licence fee. Work stays on the local machine, and the editor covers the tasks that push most people toward a commercial NLE in the first place: cutting and arranging clips across unlimited tracks, applying transitions with real-time previews, compositing overlays and watermarks, building titles, and adjusting speed and timing on individual clips. Import and export of EDL and XML keeps projects portable to and from other editing tools.

Key capabilities

• Unlimited tracks and layers, with clip resizing, scaling, trimming, snapping, rotation, and cutting.
• Curve-based keyframe animations for animating clip and effect properties over time.
• Video transitions with real-time previews, plus compositing, image overlays, and watermarks.
• Advanced Timeline with drag and drop, scrolling, panning, zooming, snapping, and frame-accurate stepping through every frame of video.
• Time-mapping and speed changes on clips, including slow or fast motion and forward or backward playback.
• Title tooling: title templates, title creation, sub-titles, 3D animated titles and effects, SVG-friendly vector titles and credits, and scrolling motion picture credits.
• Digital video effects including brightness, gamma, hue, greyscale, and chroma key, with audio mixing and editing alongside.
• Experimental hardware encoding and decoding through VA-API, NVDEC, D3D9, D3D11, and VTB.
• Import and export of widely supported interchange formats (EDL, XML), with rendering to many codecs and formats based on FFmpeg.

Who uses it and how

• Individual editors on Linux, Mac, or Windows who install a pre-built package and work entirely offline on local projects.
• Hobbyists and small production teams producing content that needs multi-track timelines, overlays, and titles rather than finishing-grade colour or audio suites.
• Testers and early adopters who track the Daily Builds, which are generated for each new commit to the repository.
• Translators, who contribute through LaunchPad for both the application and the website, and require only a web browser.
• Developers extending the editor or the C++ libraries, following the wiki instructions for configuring dependencies and building from source.

Getting started

The quickest route is to download a pre-built installer from the project's download page and, for the newest experimental builds, click the Daily Builds button. Building from source instead requires Python 3.0+ and the supporting dependencies described in the README, and the HTML documentation can be generated with cd doc followed by make html.

How it compares

Against Adobe Premiere Pro, the contrast is on licence and cost model: OpenShot carries no subscription fee, while Premiere Pro is sold as a recurring commercial licence. Its topic list marks it as gplv3, so the source is available to inspect, modify, and redistribute in a way a proprietary editor is not. It also runs fully self-hosted in the sense that matters for a desktop tool: projects live on the editor's own machine rather than in a vendor cloud account.

When to use it — and when not to

Choose OpenShot when the priority is a no-cost, cross-platform editor that installs locally and keeps project files in the user's own hands. Be aware of the rough edges before committing: hardware encoding and decoding are explicitly experimental, and the repository carries 418 open issues, so some workflows may hit rough spots. The registry also reports the licence as NOASSERTION even though the topic list says gplv3, so anyone planning to redistribute or package it should confirm the licence terms first. Teams that need real-time cloud collaboration or finishing-grade colour and audio tooling should look elsewhere.

cd doc
make html

cd [openshot-qt folder]
python3 src/launch.py

cd [libopenshot folder]
cmake -B build -S . [options]
cmake --build build
    
cd [openshot-qt folder]
PYTHONPATH=[libopenshot folder]/build/bindings/python \
python3 src/launch.py