Every model card says "multimodal". Then you hand the model a real video file and discover what that means in practice: ChatGPT reads the subtitle track, Claude doesn't accept video files at all. The model narrates a video it mostly never saw.
I unpack viral videos daily for my own content work, so I couldn't route around this. I built a small tool instead.
The mechanism
claude-real-video converts a video into three things an LLM can genuinely read:
Scene-aware sampled frames — ffmpeg scene scores decide where to sample, so you get a frame when the picture changes, not every N seconds. An --adaptive flag handles slow deformations (a real user bug report: fixed thresholds missed squash/stretch morphs entirely).
