I spent this month testing the ways people actually get an LLM to "watch" a video. One of them got a 2,181-video stress test from a single user. Here is what held up.
The three approaches on the table
1. Upload it to a hosted multimodal model (Gemini).
This is the shortest path and I want to be fair: for "tell me about this one clip," Gemini is genuinely good. You upload, you ask, you get an answer. The trade-offs are structural, not quality: your footage leaves your machine, results vary between runs, and you cannot hand the same evidence to a different model. When the answer looks wrong, there is nothing to check — you re-run and hope.
2. Run a describe-it-for-you pipeline (byjlw/video-analyzer, 1.5k stars).
