free-video-maker

Description

An open source automated video creation tool for generating short-form video content. Short Video Maker combines text-to-speech, automatic captions, background videos, and music to create engaging short videos from simple text inputs.

This project is meant to provide a free alternative to heavy GPU-power hungry video generation (and a free alternative to expensive, third-party API calls). It doesn't generate a video from scratch based on an image or an image prompt.

Checkout more AI Related Videos in our Channel WebSensePro. We encourage you to check out the channel for more AI-related content and tutorials.

The server exposes an MCP and a REST server.

While the MCP server can be used with an AI Agent (like n8n) the REST endpoints provide more flexibility for video generation.

TOC

Getting started

• How to run the server
• Web UI
• Examples

Usage

• Environment variables

Info

• Features
• How it works
• Limitations
• Acknowledgements

Examples

Check out the video 1

Check out the video 2

Features

• Generate complete short videos from text prompts
• Text-to-speech conversion
• Automatic caption generation and styling
• Background video search and selection via Pexels
• Background music with genre/mood selection
• Serve as both REST API and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server

How It Works

Shorts Creator takes simple text inputs and search terms, then:

1. Converts text to speech using Kokoro TTS
2. Generates accurate captions via Whisper
3. Finds relevant background videos from Pexels
4. Composes all elements with Remotion
5. Renders a professional-looking short video with perfectly timed captions

Limitations

• The project only capable generating videos with English voiceover (kokoro-js doesn’t support other languages at the moment)
• The background videos are sourced from Pexels

General Requirements

• internet
• free pexels api key
• ≥ 3 gb free RAM, my recommendation is 4gb RAM
• ≥ 2 vCPU
• ≥ 5gb disc space

Scene

Each video is assembled from multiple scenes. These scenes consists of

1. Text: Narration, the text the TTS will read and create captions from.
2. Search terms: The keywords the server should use to find videos from Pexels API. If none can be found, joker terms are being used (nature, globe, space, ocean)

Docker Command

docker run -it --rm --name short-video-maker -p 3123:3123 -e LOG_LEVEL=debug -e PEXELS_API_KEY= bilalnaseer/free-video-maker:latest

Web UI

Load web UI to generate videos here http://localhost:3123

Environment variables

🟢 Configuration

key	description	default
PEXELS_API_KEY	your (free) Pexels API key
LOG_LEVEL	pino log level	info
WHISPER_VERBOSE	whether the output of whisper.cpp should be forwarded to stdout	false
PORT	the port the server will listen on	3123

Acknowledgments

• ❤️ [ai_agents_az]((https://github.com/gyoridavid/ai_agents_az) AI Agents AZ is the original creator of this repo, which I forked to make it easier for my youtube audience.