Why I built Vootkit to run in your browser

This started with one boring, repeated annoyance: cutting the same clip into three shapes for three platforms. A 9:16 for Reels, a 1:1 for the feed, a 16:9 for YouTube. Every time, the same routine — upload the file to some site, wait, download, upload to the next site for the next ratio, wait again. For a 400MB clip on a normal connection, that's most of a coffee break spent watching progress bars.

Two things bugged me. First, the waiting was all upload and download — the actual work took seconds. Second, I was handing my raw footage to servers I knew nothing about, just to crop it.

The realization

Browsers can already do this. Modern browsers ship with a canvas, audio decoding, and the ability to run compiled C code through WebAssembly — including FFmpeg, the same engine professional video software is built on. There was no technical reason the file had to leave my machine at all.

What that changes

When processing is local, the annoyances disappear in a specific order. There's no upload wait, because there's no upload. There's no file-size cap from a server, because there's no server — the only limit is your own device's memory. And there's no privacy trade-off to think about, because the footage never reaches anyone, including me.

The honest trade-off

It isn't magic. Doing the work on your device means a big 4K video can be slow on a phone, and a giant merge can run out of memory where a server farm wouldn't. I'd rather tell you that up front than pretend otherwise. For the vast majority of real clips — the ones you actually need to resize, trim, or compress — it's faster end to end because you skip the round trip entirely.

That's the whole idea behind the Video Engine and the PDF utilities: tools that fix a specific annoyance, on your device, without asking you to trust a server with your files.