video-analyser

video-analyser is a skill for Claude Code from mthines/agent-skills. It costs 155 tokens per session (5,928 once invoked), scanned C, original, MIT.

A tool for examining video files, especially screen recordings of software bugs, to identify errors, interface state, and reproduction steps. It extracts still frames and can read visible text or spoken narration when the required tools are available.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to analyse a local video, a direct video link, or a video attached to a Linear issue, including its frames, on-screen text, and audio instructions.
Why use it?
It turns a long or hard-to-describe recording into structured details that help explain and reproduce the problem.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the mthines-agent-skills plugin — 55 skills, 4 agents shipped together

Good fit Use it to analyse a local video, a direct video link, or a video attached to a Linear issue, including its frames, on-screen text, and audio instructions.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mthines/agent-skills/video-analyser
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add mthines/agent-skills --skill video-analyser
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mthines/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install mthines-agent-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 55 skills, 4 agents.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for video-analyser

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/video-analyser/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/video-analyser)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/video-analyser"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/video-analyser/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for video-analyser

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/mthines/agent-skills/video-analyser"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/mthines/agent-skills/video-analyser.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 155 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,928 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan C 2 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00155 $0.05928
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.02964
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.01186
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00593

Measured 11d ago against content hash e0b15cbee904, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

video-analyser scanned grade C with 2 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

trap 'rm -rf "$WORK_DIR"' EXIT

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

| Direct video URL | Input matches `^https?://` and does not match `linear\.app` | Download: `curl -fL -o "$WORK_DIR/input.mp4" "$INPUT"`. Use `$WORK_DIR/input.mp4` as `VIDEO_PATH`. |
skills/analysis/video-analyser/SKILL.md · 496 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 496 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Video Analyser Skill

Analyse a video file to extract bugs, errors, UI state, and reproduction steps. The pipeline uses ffmpeg for frame extraction, optional tesseract OCR for text, and optional whisper for audio narration. The default path (8 keyframes at 768 px) is the Pareto-optimal setting for screen recordings: best quality-per-token on the legibility curve.

By default the selected frames are packed into a single tiled contact sheet and sent to the analysis prompt as one image. This is cheaper on vision tokens and gives a temporal overview at a glance. An opt-in split mode keeps the legacy behaviour of one full-resolution image block per frame — use it when small UI text must be read (see Frame Delivery Mode).

Prerequisites

Required tools

Tool Check If missing
ffmpeg which ffmpeg Print: ffmpeg is required. Install with: brew install ffmpeg (macOS) or apt install ffmpeg (Linux). Then exit.
ffprobe which ffprobe Print: ffprobe is required. It ships with ffmpeg — reinstall ffmpeg. Then exit.

Optional tools (silent degradation)

Tool If present If absent
tesseract Enable OCR mode for text-heavy frames Skip silently; use vision-only mode
whisper Enable audio transcription when user mentions narration or voiceover Skip audio step silently

Run tool detection before any other step.

which ffmpeg  || { echo "ffmpeg is required. Install with: brew install ffmpeg (macOS) or apt install ffmpeg (Linux)."; exit 1; }
which ffprobe || { echo "ffprobe is required. It ships with ffmpeg — reinstall ffmpeg."; exit 1; }
OCR_ENABLED=false; which tesseract >/dev/null 2>&1 && OCR_ENABLED=true
AUDIO_ENABLED=false

Minimum ffmpeg version

Require ffmpeg 4 or later. The select='eq(pict_type\,I)' filter and -vsync vfr were introduced in ffmpeg 4. Document this requirement in the bail message if detection fails.

Temp Directory

Read the full file on GitHub · 496 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 496 lines · 155 tokens per session scan C e0b15cbee904

Subscribe to this mod's changes

video-analyser is a skill published in the GitHub repository mthines/agent-skills (13 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 155 tokens to every session and 5,928 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 2 findings (recursive force delete, makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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