Microsoft Clipchamp | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Clipchamp

clipchamp.com

156 pointsnateb2022129 comments

Firefox users are asked to please stay away:

It looks like your browser is not supported To use Clipchamp, make sure you're using the latest version of Google Chrome, or the latest Microsoft Edge

So sick of sites doing this. Labelbox even does it! Absolutely absurd.

Same for safari indeed.

Not supporting Safari is understandable for personal/toy project because you can't as easily test Safari without buying some Apple kit – whereas I can run Firefox, Chromium based browsers, and so forth, on my existing PCs and phones, in VMs if I want to check different OSs for odd differences.

Not good from though for, as in this case, something from MS.

And I don't block Safari, I just consider it a third class citizen when it comes to what little time I have to give for support.

I went down the rabbit hole of trying to connect to iOS Safari’s web inspector from my Linux machine last week. From the trail of activity on GitHub it looks like it might have been possible during about 2015–2020 but the open source adapter has since been effectively abandoned, with too few people doing the necessary ongoing maintenance. I spent a while trying to do it myself but it requires a deeper understanding of WebKit and Chromium internals than I possess.

Using Firefox with the user agent changed to chrome seems to get around this

Of course it will, so the question becomes "why drive away Firefox when it works fine"?

we all know the answer

Because Firefox has such a small market share that it isn't worth spending the resources to support it.

How is adding a thing that complains that the user is using Firefox less resources spent than not doing it?

Adding the thing that complains is a one-time cost. It may work on Firefox now, but making sure that it continues working on Firefox is a continuous resource investment.

And not adding it and not testing for Firefox would cost nothing, and currently improve the user experience - because it actually just works, as a lot of things just do.

But then what if a bug in their code that only affects FF goes unnoticed due to testing, and causes significant problems for a big client, or a journalist reviewing it, or...

Personally I feel a "We don't officially support this browser, it probably works but we only test for full compatibility in <these browsers>" is a better option if you're going to go in that direction.

But I can understand why even that is a bit of a risk as if a user decides to ignore that warning and then some time later encounters a bug that, let's say, causes them to lose half a day of work, they're likely to walk away blaming the company (and maybe go round telling people they know what a shit thing it is) even if the bug wouldn't have happened had they been using one of the browsers that is fully supported and gets tested.

It seems more like the devs at MS know their code works on Firefox but have been asked by exec to push chromium(-esque) because edge is now webkit.

sidenote: this is a multi-billion $ company, no excuse to ignore any platform with their capacity, front face it looks like they can't build a good app anymore, especially if it works anyway with a simple string change in the browser - heck, web devs had to factor in ie7-8 polyfills built by the community only a few years ago. no excuse.

I recall that the advice given to web developers for a long time was to query browser capabilities instead of relying on a user agent string. If this site is indeed relying on the user agent string, I don’t get why larger companies which probably have better capable teams resort to this.

Works for me(tm). No, really - I just navigated to the page with Firefox 103 on Wind10/64 and just got a normal website for the editor, with download links, videos, etc. Nothing about me needing to use a chrome based browser. Maybe they changed this?

I don't see the message until I click the "Try for Free" button.

Feels like 2000s again, we are supposed to switch browser for each site again.

It helps when Mozilla has a backbone and shows up to the standards meetings.

Hi! Engineer who actually works on Clipchamp.

Sorry you ran into that issue. Firefox support is in the works - we plan to support the same set of browsers as the other Office features, as described here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/which-browsers-wo...

If this tech looks interesting, come join us! We have a bunch of open engineering positions in Brisbane that are 100% WFH from Australia: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/search-results?keywords=...

What, exactly, is making the website work fine on Chrome/Edge but not on Firefox? Are you using some bleeding-edge API that isn't available in Firefox yet?

In my experience it's simply developer resources. In my entire career, I've never seen a complex web app "just work" across multiple browsers without some, if not a lot of, effort.

Testing on all browsers all the time is a significant cost to velocity. It almost always makes more sense to build for a single browser first, then figure out where the comparability issues are once you have an actual product.

> It almost always makes more sense to build for a single browser first, then figure out where the comparability issues are once you have an actual product.

I agree, and most places I've worked with has been the same. But I think only once, after following that process, have we ended up in "Damn, this works 100% in Chrome but is completely broken in Firefox". Sometimes something works faster/slower in Chrome/Firefox, but without requiring something like the Web MIDI API, most things just works the same across browsers, minus some minor things regarding CSS that has to be taken into consideration.

I guess what I'm looking for with my previous comment, is not so much of a general/philosophical answer of "Why you block Firefox but not Chrome?" but rather a specific answer to "What ended up being broken in Firefox but working in Chrome?"

Mostly helpful for my own curiosity, but in the strange case of finding things that works in Chrome but not Firefox, leaving a report at https://webcompat.com/ can be very helpful for the general health of the web as well.

In my experience it's subtle bugs that don't appear on one platform but do in the other. webcompat is great for true deviations from the spec but there are plenty of cases where things work for no good reason and it's a chore to figure out why.

I'm also a bit curious why blocking Firefox is preferred versus stating which browsers are supported.

https://caniuse.com/?search=worker%20module

This is something I just personally bumped into in switching from webpack to vite (svelte app).

Not often that FF is the problem. Usually it's Safari but that is becoming less common.

I think I can work attend it, we'll see next week.

Hi, am I being obstinate for thinking "Sorry you ran into that issue" is a bit strangely worded?

It's just corpspeak.

I used this software (the app version) a couple weeks ago for the first time. I grabbed a great clip while playing a game and wanted to show it to a friend, but I didn't want to send the full 500MB 60s video when the clip was only ~6 seconds. I didn't want to spend a ton of time downloading proper editing software so I gave it a shot. It's a little clunky if I'm honest, it feels like an evolution of Windows Movie Maker; it works in a pinch, just don't expect anything professional to come out of it.

i have similar use cases, avidemux is a small free program and it excels in this trimming scenario. if you dont change video output settings (copy) it will trim in a few seconds, no rendering or transcoding

The feature only snaps to the nearest keyframe though.

Video game recordings are normally not terribly long gop (couple seconds) because the scenery isn't static enough for that anyway.

On Windows 10 (not sure about win 11) there is now a built in app called Video Editor, which seems like an evolution of Movie Maker.

I usually use the Xbox app that's probably preinstalled on your Windows computer anyway; it's built to integrate with the game bar and can cut videos quite easily.

For this reason, and the fact that Windows already ships a clip editor, I'm not sure what Microsoft is planning to do with this. Maybe they'll replace the built in editor at some point?

My guess is that really it’s an acquisition of engineers unless they already have some kind of market dominance in this space.

I don’t see any novel tech here, but I’m not the target audience.

LosslessCut is my go to for that sort of thing

https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

Wow! Fantastic tool (just tried it out) -- thank you for the rec :)

This was originally a startup in Brisbane that was acquired, not a Microsoft name.

HN title needs editing.

Not necessarily. It does belong to MS now.

Yes saw a sister comment with a link that says that even though the main link doesn’t.

Main link does, see footer.

For people who don't want to sign up but still like the idea of a video editor running in a browser (that doesn't upload anything), I am working on an alternative:

https://vidmix.app

thanks. I don't think I should have to log in to type a document or edit a video. :/ Thank you!

> Your browser has limited support for this webapp. Please use the latest Chrome or Edge for better performance, stability, and more features.

Using Firefox 105. What features are bad or missing in Firefox, and do you know if Mozilla is working on fixing them?

WebCodecs is missing. They say it's "worth prototyping" [1] but I don't know whether they are working on it.

1: https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

As I understand it, Web Codecs is quite a ways away from being a web standard - it is currently just a draft[1] for a recommendation for a possible future standard.

Just beware of any major API changes or any indication that it might be dropped in its entirety!

[1]:https://w3c.github.io/webcodecs/

Stuff like that and late AV1[0] are one reason I moved to Edge after 19 years on Firefox. More so just that I was impressed with Edge when I tried it. Brave also stood out to me when I tested every browser. It’s fast but has the distinction of being the only semi-major browser that’s fully open source other than Firefox. Edge is still very good, I would say it’s the best browser going but I’d be tarred and feathered for that.

[0]https://www.androidpolice.com/mozilla-is-finally-adding-av1-...

I think using Chrome or Edge for PWAs and Firefox for general browsing is an acceptable compromise. I don't need to use the same program for video editing and reading news articles etc, although it would be nice if I could.

For the technologist that wants that single program, and values privacy and transparency like most of us do, Brave fits the bill nicely. It’s currently my second favorite browser after Edge.

That said, I had Clipchamp installed from the MS Store before I went back to MS Video Editor.

Feels like we're burying the lede here focusing on firefox/chrome or having to login when it's really damned impressive that you have an entire video editor in the browser.

So it seems like codec support allows viewing individual frames, and you've got some kind of ffmpeg script, and some kind of totally canvas based ui. There's a lot of cool tech in here showing some really interesting possibilities. Congrats on that!

What kind of ui library are you using for this btw?

I've built the UI library myself, it's written in C++ and is drawing with OpenGL. (translated to WebGL by emscripten) Javascript is only used for the browser-related parts. The point of this is that the javascript layer can be easily replaced and the project built for other platforms. (for example it runs on iOS natively: https://apple.co/3QVAYAq)

Looks good, can you tell us more about the tech behind it? Are you running FFMPEG in the browser or something?

I use a WebAssembly build of FFmpeg to extract the streams and packets from the video files and as a fallback for some codecs. But most of the decoding/encoding is done with WebCodecs which in most cases has access to hardware acceleration so can be much faster than ffmpeg.

A rather simple utility that for some reason requires a login, I see no value in that when there are so many analogs that don't.

What's your favorite alternative?

hiring a courtroom artist to depict my lame parties

Virtualdub

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time. Is it still under development?

Back in my teens I was really wanting to get into 3D animation and virtualdub was one of the first tools I used to create reels since the free modeling and rigging tool I used at the time didn’t have any editing capabilities.

It seems that not very much, but this is a lot of the case of finished software: it's good for its job. The author is not gone though, there is a blog post from a year ago.

DaVinci Resolve

Microsoft Video Editor. It’s simple and fast, and comes with Windows. Unless I were a Youtuber I stop there because there’s no subscription.

Though I agree with the sentiment, the core feature this seems to provide is stock video integration. And stock media services always require login.

You could make that optional with login.

But let's not pretend it's about that...they just want you data.

How many times on that landing page do they mention "Windows PC"? Eleven times! We got the message!

It looks like they're trying to resist "Great software, but can you release a Mac version"?

That was a landing page for Windows version, what do you expect?. Here is home page: https://clipchamp.com/

The OP link should be this. But I found that even on MacOS Chrome I got the 'browser unsupported' message

Works for me (M1 Pro MBP, updated Chrome)

Such a Microsofty name, I am a bit confused about ther relationship with Microsoft given the title of the post and MS logo at the bottom of the page.

Linked from their "About us" page: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/08/microsoft-acquires-video-c...

Look at their jobs page - backend tech is moving from python to c#. Makes sense why now.

https://clipchamp.com/en/terms/ says:

>Clipchamp Pty Ltd (ACN 162516556), a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation

Founded in Brisbane. Acquired by MS about a year ago.

Requires an account? Sigh.

Does it in the app? Microsoft Store does have that dark pattern of looking like it wants you to sign in but then downloading the application anyway when you press cancel.

Edit: Oh wow it is a packaged "web-app". I see. That's unfortunate.

i use windows movie maker. It still exists, you can download it as binary and it's a pretty quick video editor with lots of options. I was unable to figure out the new win10 editor or chipchamp

Kdenlive is pretty decent on windows if you need a bit more control.

this is what I use. Should be more than enough for amateur or home movies and basic effects.

As someone who has also worked on an in-browser video editor before, I do tip my hat to the developers working on Clipchamp. I think it's one of the better implemented products in this space considering that the memory-intensive process of encoding videos has not traditionally scaled very well into the browser. That being said, I'll probably still be sticking to something like iMovie or Resolve for more basic video editing since native NLEs are still way more performant overall (and they're free to use).

I’ve used this but the existing Microsoft video editor is better. I even set up an account and everything for Clip champ. It may be better for short videos, clips. But in general I feel like Microsoft is existing free video editor is the way to go. I use it a lot.

One huge difference between the two is that Clip champ is very slow in encoding your videos. Microsoft video editor will use all your cores or GPU acceleration. Whichever you prefer. I’ve noticed I get better results with CPU encoding. But Clip champ doesn’t even offer that and it’s very slow.

I have a very, very slow connection particularly for upload. Releasing a desktop "app" which wraps a website for video editing of all things... Feels like a spit in the face.

Disclaimer: Final Cut user here, so I will be extremely biased.

While parts of UI are ripoff from Final Cut. I still found it to be pretty basic. Won’t be using it and I doubt other professionals will.

Nevertheless can be good tool for free usage and meme makers. It still unlocks a sizable market for Microsoft.

Comparing this to FCP is a cheap swing. Obviously this is meant as an iMovie/MovieMaker alternative, not for professionals.

I ditched Clipchamp in favour of Flixier. It is 10 times better. It is usable on other platforms, allows both video and audio processing (including features missing on Clipchamp, like audio eq and green screen processing).

I am no associated with Flixier in any form but a customer.

$30 a month just to export at full resolution and $15 a month to export at 1080p, free only allows 720p. (Yearly sub gives 20% discount)

Unfortunately, I could totally get behind throttling export speed or maybe the other stuff but it's just very neutered

It's $8 for me, the yearly sub is a 42% discount.

Even at $15, that's pretty fair given that it's a tool that someone is going to use for their job or at least an involved hobby.

anybody used this? i still have found 0 software that beats the ease of use, discoverability, simplicity, power and overall ux of Capcut and that's mobile. tbh i'd prefer desktop if i could find it so this could be cool.

CapCut has a desktop version! I have not tried it myself so no idea how good it is: https://www.capcut.com/

oh cool, didn't know this, thanks!

Can they bring back Clippy as a mascot for this? Or maybe McZee?

There's also a nice and light video editor built-into Windows Photos app (which is now prompting to install Clipchamp). It's pretty good for short clips.

Why is this a download if it's a web app?

I have been wondering for years I'd this product is ffmpeg transpiled into JavaScript so it can run in the browser. It feels like there might be a nice open source opportunity here if so, although I imagine they've spent most of the last few years dealing with all the edge cases that make this work.

Are there any good open source video editors? I've been holding my breath on VLMC for over a decade now...

Cinelerra and OpenShot for a start.

What the hell is "Windows PC" and why does it want me to download a web app?

Oh, the link is weird. The start page is a lot less incoherent: https://clipchamp.com

I swear a god, when I read the name I though MS have released a game featuring Clippy as the main character. Must be getting old, I guess. :-)

The name probably comes from Twitch culture, the idea of a “clipchamp” being someone who cut a clip of a stream in just the right way (often intentionally cutting out context to make a moment more funny). The opposite is a “clipchimp”, when a clip is cut poorly.

Great for Windows users, but is there something like ‘Canva for marketing/explainer videos’ but online/Mac?

This is fully web based. It works online and on Macs

It says ‘for Windows PC’ quite prominently right throughout its copy on the landing page. Does no one else see that? Or have a missed a web option hiding on the page?

Edit: The link is for some reason pointing to the PC version. Anyway, I tried it on MacOS Chrome, but it says my browser is unsupported (and to get Chrome or Edge... ?)

Just look at that Windows mess (ehh 'base' install) from the Site:

https://images.ctfassets.net/b4k16c7lw5ut/95VgtrEkyNEPkTKQ0r...

Candy Crush and McAfee....really Microsoft??

Also Paint3D which no one used ever?

They just completely stopped caring and anyone who has an idea for a quick buck or markering stunt seems to be allowed to put their shit into Windows or slap the Microsoft logo on it.

That's literally the experience that you get when you buy a new computer with Windows.

And when that screenshot was taken, it did not actually finish downloading all the adware yet. Normally at the end of a (non-business) Windows install you have around 6 adware programs, depending on the region. Disney+, multiple "games", etc.

I saw the headline and hoped it was a multi type clipboard history app for Windows. Sadly nope.

Can it do video screen capture? It’s a hassle to show stuff to people using windows.

That page’s really weird. Also, since when is the start menu called the “Windows launcher”‽

Does this work on Wine?

What?! Even the paid tier only allows 1080p max? What am I missing here?

Paid tier includes "free" access to their stock (Storyblocks) media. It is somewhat cheaper to get a Storyblocks video subscription through Clipchamp than through Storyblocks themselves.

I presume at some point 4K will be added, but given that YouTube metrics show that 4k media is still very niche (1080p is something like 85% of viewing), I can see why that might not be top of mind for this.

Is it only me or does the title’s color scheme hurt the eyes?

The first review on the Microsoft Store should be featured on the home page:

"Found this during a search for the word "clip." The app's description is dishonest, to say the least. This is not an app. It's a wrapper for an unidentified website. As soon as I opened the "app", it asked for personally identifiable information. The wrapper makes impossible to verify the site's digital certificate. It was suspicious, to say the least. The description says it is a Microsoft product, but don't fall for it. In the past, malicious apps under false identity has slipped into the Store. Either it is not a Microsoft app or Microsoft has fallen shockingly low."

For a moment I thought they were bringing back Clippy

Even Microsoft couldn't be THAT evil

Is clippy necessarily evil? I mean we have the floating action button in some apps, clippy just provided FAB like functionality with some personality.

Then again, the FAB is pretty horrendous too most of the time, so maybe it's not the best way.

But I think in some very limited cases it could be a good way to provide shortcuts that bypass huge stacks of menus. Modern apps have gone in a more lightweight direction though so maybe we just don't need that.

When people call Clippy evil, it's not because of his role as an assistant for Microsoft products. Rather, they're referring to his later actions in running several cryptocurrency pump and dump schemes.

It was really a tragic fall.

Well, desperation can drive people to all kinds or things, especially if they are ignorant of the consequences.

If he still had a job, and had better AI, perhaps he wouldn't have turned to crime?

Stick to Davinci Resolve, OpenShot or other options that don't require creating yet another login.

Davinci Resolve is $300 and OpenShotnis probably disorienting for a lot of new entry users.

Clipchamp seems easy enough for most amateurs. It’s great to have a completely free watermark-free alternative from Microsoft. Of course it can’t provide all the features.

DaVinci Resolve has a free version

Davinci Resolve is available as a very complete free version. Or rather, Davinci Resolve is free, Davinci Resolve Studio costs money.

I use OpenShot a lot and it was really easy to get started and easy to use. It tends to crash now and then, so save often.

Does Resolve support integrated graphics?

>Clipchamp is created worldwide, but we're headquartered in Brisbane/Meanjin, Australia, on the traditional lands of the Turrbal and Yuggera Peoples.

>We acknowledge the traditional custodians of country, and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

Imagine these levels of guilt.

What’s the problem with it? Seems like a nice gesture. Land acknowledgments are quite common these days.

What a name. I get they were going for "cute" but they could have come up with something better and a little easier to say.

The software was named by the company which developed it: Clipchamp Pty Ltd was founded in 2013 and was acquired by Microsoft in 2021.

More details: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/clipchamp-pty-ltd

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