# OpenShot OpenShot is a free and [[Open Source]] video editor for [[Linux]], macOS and Windows. The desktop app (openshot-qt) is written in [[Python]] with Qt and licensed under the [[GPLv3 License]]. The actual media work happens in libopenshot, a C++ library under the [[LGPL License]] that reads every format and codec [[FFmpeg]] supports. The project is funded by user donations rather than licenses; its 2013 Kickstarter campaign passed $35k. Why care? Free video editing usually means picking between a full creative suite like [[Blender]] (its video editor is fine if you already know Blender's shortcuts) and the free tier of a commercial app. OpenShot sits in the same group as Kdenlive and Shotcut: a dedicated editor for cutting clips, adding titles and exporting for YouTube, with nothing to pay and nothing to sign up for. ## Update (August 2026) The big release shipped on August 30, 2026, and a patch release followed on September 27. The team calls it some of the biggest workflow upgrades in the project's history. It pulls three jobs into the editor that usually need separate tools: - **Recording View**: record the microphone, screen, webcam and system audio straight into the project. Each source becomes its own clip, so you can trim the voice or move the webcam overlay later without touching the screen capture. Works on Windows, macOS, Linux X11 and Wayland (via PipeWire). It's basically what you'd otherwise do in [[OBS Studio]] and then import. - **Color View**: a Color Grade effect with exposure, temperature and saturation controls, color wheels for shadows/midtones/highlights, RGB curves, `.cube` LUTs with an intensity slider, and four live video scopes (luma waveform, histogram, RGB parade, vectorscope with a skin-tone line). Everything is keyframable. - **Object Mask**: click a few points on a subject and OpenShot tracks a mask through the clip. It runs YOLO, EfficientSAM and Cutie models converted to [[ONNX]] on your own machine. No account, no subscription, no upload of your footage. That's [[On-Device Machine Learning]] used on the kind of data you'd rather not upload anyway (raw footage is big and often private). On top of that: ten new effects (audio visualization, beat sync, film grain, denoise, glow, timer, displacement map…), a fully native Qt timeline replacing the old web-based components, and a Blur effect the team measured as 61.8% faster than before. libopenshot and libopenshot-audio both got their first stable release. Android groundwork exists in the codebase, but the team says explicitly that Android is NOT a supported platform yet and gives no date. ## What the Hacker News crowd said The release hit 600+ points on Hacker News. Critiques and takeaways from the thread: - **Lossless cutting should be the default.** One user who used to donate to OpenShot now leans toward LosslessCut and Shotcut, arguing that most people just want to splice files without re-encoding. Another replied that lossless editing forces you to cut on specific intervals and only works with compatible streams, so it'll probably stay a specialized tool (or a locked mode inside a regular editor). - **DaVinci Resolve remains the benchmark.** Two non-professionals said Resolve is easy to learn and hard to beat even for simple edits. The counterpoint: Resolve doesn't run everywhere, and one Linux user said OpenShot lets them edit quickly there. - **Stability memories linger.** One commenter quit years ago because exports were slow and often broke. Another found OpenShot, Shotcut and Kdenlive "rather cheap"; a third found Kdenlive more intuitive. - **Missing pieces for specific workflows.** No VST audio plugin support (a blocker for one Resolve user), and one multi-camera user asked for hue-vs-hue and hue-vs-saturation curves, which the announcement doesn't mention. - **Accessibility.** A screen reader user said Clipchamp is currently the only video editor that sort of works for them, and planned to test the new release. - **Screenshots undersell it.** Two commenters pointed out that a video editor announced with still images undersells itself. The local models are the clearest difference with commercial editors. [[Descript]] meters its AI features through plan credits; OpenShot's masking runs offline, for free, under a copyleft license. The stability complaints in the thread were about older versions, not the August 2026 release. ## References - Announcement: https://www.openshot.org/blog/2026/08/30/openshot-40-record-edit-color-like-never-before/ - Source code: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt - libopenshot: https://github.com/OpenShot/libopenshot - ONNX model exports: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-onnx - Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49507822 ## Related - [[Video editing]] - [[OpenCut]] - [[OBS Studio]] - [[FFmpeg]] - [[On-Device Machine Learning]] - [[Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)]]