Skip to main content

English 简体中文

🎬 Movie Narrator

Python License CI PyPI Downloads

One Prompt → One Narrated Movie Video

Movie Narrator is an open-source toolkit that automatically generates movie recap videos with narration, subtitles, and rendered output from a simple command.


Features

  • 🎬 LLM-powered movie recap script generation
  • 🔊 Text-to-Speech narration (Edge-TTS by default)
  • 💬 Automatic SRT subtitle generation
  • 🌐 Multi-language subtitles with LLM translation
  • 🏁 Multi-candidate horse race — run N variations, auto-pick the best
  • 🎯 Reference video imitation — extract style from viral narration
  • 👁️ VLM scene captioning via cloud VLM API
  • 🎭 Narrator perspective (omniscient / character / detective)
  • 🎨 Render template system (title cards, watermarks, slogans)
  • 🔍 TMDB fact verification with source attribution
  • 🖥️ Web UI (separate movie-narrator-web package)
  • 🎞️ Video rendering (1080p/4K output)
  • 📝 Script markdown export
  • 🎵 Background music integration
  • 🔌 Extensible plugin architecture (custom TTS / LLM backends)
  • ☁️ Async task processing (submit and go, notified on completion)
  • 🌐 Remote inference via REST API
  • ✅ Final-video QA — black-frame / slideshow-risk detection
  • 🗣️ Optional Chinese ASR (automatic multi-backend fallback)

Installation

Requirements

  • Python 3.10+

Install Movie Narrator

From PyPI

pip install movie-narrator

From Source

git clone https://github.com/zcbacxc/movie-narrator.git
cd movie-narrator
pip install -e .

Optional extras

# Scene detection (PySceneDetect)
pip install "movie-narrator[media]"

# WhisperX + faster-whisper + FunASR + semantic search (requires PyTorch; Python < 3.14)
pip install "movie-narrator[ml]"

# Web UI (FastAPI + React) — separate package
pip install movie-narrator-web

# Everything
pip install "movie-narrator[full]"

Note on Python 3.14+: The [ml] extra is limited to Python < 3.14 — PyTorch itself is now 3.14-ready (2.10+), but downstream ML dependencies (WhisperX, FunASR) have not yet shipped Python 3.14 wheels; on 3.14+ it is silently skipped and the align/match steps automatically soft-degrade (see Soft steps).

For development:

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Quick Start

Prerequisites

  • LLM: Default uses local Ollama (ollama serve to start). Or configure remote LLM via .env file.

Basic Usage

# Generate a narrated movie video
mn create --movie "飞驰人生" --style "热血搞笑" --duration 60

# With custom voice and format
mn create --movie "飞驰人生" --voice "zh-CN-XiaoxiaoNeural" --format "9:16"

More Commands

mn create --config examples/job.example.yaml     # Drive from YAML config
mn create --subtitle-lang en --subtitle-mode bilingual  # Multi-language subtitles
mn race --movie "飞驰人生" --video movie.mp4 --candidates 3  # Multi-candidate horse race
mn imitate --reference viral_ref.mp4 --movie "飞驰人生"  # Reference video imitation
mn serve               # Start remote inference API server (v0.6.1+)
mn submit -m <movie>   # Submit async task
mn tasks               # List recent tasks
mn version             # Show version
mn --help              # Show full CLI help

All CLI flags and usage examples are documented in examples/cli-usage.sh.


Configuration

All settings use the MN_ prefix to avoid conflicts with other tools.

Via .env file (recommended)

~/.movie-narrator/.env is auto-created with default values on first run — edit it to configure LLM, TTS, and other settings. This file lives outside the package, so pip install/upgrade/uninstall never touches it. You can also create a project-level .env in your working directory for per-project overrides.

MN_LLM_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1
MN_LLM_API_KEY=ollama
MN_LLM_MODEL=qwen2.5:7b
MN_DEFAULT_VOICE=zh-CN-YunxiNeural

Via environment variables

# PowerShell
$env:MN_LLM_BASE_URL="http://localhost:11434/v1"
$env:MN_LLM_MODEL="qwen2.5:7b"
mn create --movie "飞驰人生" --duration 60
# Linux / macOS
export MN_LLM_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1
export MN_LLM_MODEL=qwen2.5:7b
mn create --movie "飞驰人生" --duration 60

Config lookup order

Priority Location Notes
1 Environment variables (MN_*) Highest
2 cwd/.env Project-level
3 ~/.movie-narrator/.env User-level, never lost on pip install/upgrade/uninstall
4 Built-in defaults Local Ollama

Full reference

See .env.example for the complete list of all environment variables (LLM + TTS infrastructure only). All pipeline behavior is configured via examples/job.example.yaml — params keys covering scene detection, match, render, translate, BGM, WhisperX/FunASR align, async, and video sizes.

LLM Provider Guides

Movie Narrator works with any OpenAI-compatible LLM. New user? Check out the LLM Provider Guides for step-by-step registration and free-tier setup:

Provider Free Tier Best For
Ollama Completely free (local) Privacy, offline use
Zhipu (GLM) glm-4-flash unlimited free Zero-cost, no GPU
Alibaba Bailian 1M tokens per model Qwen flagship models
Xiaomi MiMo Limited-time free + ¥10 invite bonus LLM + TTS in one platform
SiliconFlow Free models + voucher credits Multi-model switching

Output

File Description
narration.mp3 AI-generated narration audio
mixed.mp3 Narration + BGM overlay (when BGM enabled; otherwise narration.mp3 used directly)
subtitle.srt Synchronized subtitle file (original narration)
subtitle.<lang>.srt Translated subtitle (when --subtitle-lang set)
subtitle.bilingual.srt Bilingual subtitle (when --subtitle-lang set)
script.md Human-readable script
research.json Movie research data (when --research)
metadata.json Segment timings, pipeline status, config
final.mp4 Rendered video (16:9 or 9:16)
matches.json Scene-to-segment clip matching (when video provided)
clips/ Per-segment clip .mp4 files (when --no-clips not set)

clips/ holds a standalone clip per segment, ready for secondary editing or reuse.


Pipeline

16-step sequential pipeline (see Architecture):

resolve_video → prepare_assets → research_plot → generate_script →
export_script_md → generate_voice → align_audio → detect_scenes →
match_clips → mix_bgm → translate_subtitles → generate_subtitle →
run_qa_gate → render_video → validate_deliverable → export_clips

Soft steps (research, align, scene detect, scene match, BGM, translate, QA gate, clip export) gracefully skip or soft-degrade when optional dependencies are missing or upstream data is unavailable. Use --strict to abort instead.


Project Structure

For contributors — most users only need mn create. See Architecture for details.

movie-narrator/
├── src/movie_narrator/
│   ├── cli.py               # Typer CLI entry point
│   ├── config.py            # Pydantic settings
│   ├── models.py            # Data models (Context, Status, etc.)
│   ├── contract.py          # Stable API contract surface
│   ├── pipeline/            # 16-step pipeline (runner, steps, errors)
│   ├── cloud/               # Task queue, remote inference, batch, scheduling, DLQ, distributed (v0.9.x)
│   ├── reliability/         # Circuit breaker + retry policy (v0.9.1)
│   ├── workflow/            # YAML job config (schema, loader, merge)
│   ├── tts/                 # TTS provider abstraction layer
│   └── utils/               # Shared utilities (console, log, font, etc.)
├── tests/                   # Unit + integration tests
├── docs/                    # Architecture, guides, roadmap
├── examples/                # Job YAML, CLI usage, plugins
└── .github/workflows/       # CI/CD

Documentation


Compliance Notices

  • Edge-TTS: the default TTS channel (edge) is built on a reverse-engineered, unofficial interface. It is provided for personal / non-commercial free testing only. For commercial deployment, switch MN_TTS_PROVIDER to openai or mimo (both built-in).
  • TMDB: movie research data is sourced from TMDB (The Movie Database). When TMDB data is used, the source attribution is recorded in research.json as required, as a courtesy.

License

Licensed under the AGPL-3.0-or-later License.

Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

movie_narrator-1.2.1.tar.gz (649.8 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

If you're not sure about the file name format, learn more about wheel file names.

movie_narrator-1.2.1-py3-none-any.whl (440.2 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 3

File details

Details for the file movie_narrator-1.2.1.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: movie_narrator-1.2.1.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 649.8 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? Yes
  • Uploaded via: twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14

File hashes

Hashes for movie_narrator-1.2.1.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 0997ea45129f4a9e9ab7392998b8ed97b2c644d66727bd91624bddaf7590b364
MD5 2eb04b84285fca655cddac7372c2307c
BLAKE2b-256 c211940b92722d5f7eca047fe6247c67ff44cae3bc2212dfbb20606c4c13927b

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for movie_narrator-1.2.1.tar.gz:

Publisher: publish.yml on zcbacxc/movie-narrator

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

File details

Details for the file movie_narrator-1.2.1-py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: movie_narrator-1.2.1-py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 440.2 kB
  • Tags: Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? Yes
  • Uploaded via: twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14

File hashes

Hashes for movie_narrator-1.2.1-py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 cfc82f350cf6277a7f4a31eff24a79703929c55f6b7828670e3c30b8fead869b
MD5 e55c944a3acfa9fd59c1bdac2350af97
BLAKE2b-256 40e6ba029c1be391294a471b5ff02c3928122b51d8af4206ed31262c4866e87b

See more details on using hashes here.

Provenance

The following attestation bundles were made for movie_narrator-1.2.1-py3-none-any.whl:

Publisher: publish.yml on zcbacxc/movie-narrator

Attestations: Values shown here reflect the state when the release was signed and may no longer be current.

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

1.5.2

2 files

1.5.1

2 files

1.5.0

2 files

1.4.2

2 files

1.4.1

2 files

1.4.0

2 files

1.3.2

2 files

1.3.1

2 files

1.3.0

2 files

This release

1.2.1 This release

2 files

1.2.0

2 files

1.1.0

2 files

1.0.0

2 files

0.9.7

2 files

0.9.6

2 files

0.9.5

2 files

0.9.4

2 files

0.9.3

2 files

0.9.2

2 files

0.9.1

2 files

0.8.4

2 files

0.8.3

2 files

0.8.2

2 files

0.8.1

2 files

0.8.0

2 files

0.7.5

2 files

0.7.4

2 files

0.7.3

2 files

0.7.2

2 files

0.7.1

2 files

0.7.0

2 files

0.6.1

2 files

0.6.0

2 files

0.5.12

2 files

0.5.11

2 files

0.5.10

2 files

0.5.9

2 files

0.5.8

2 files

0.5.7

2 files

0.5.6

2 files

0.5.5

2 files

0.5.4

2 files

0.5.3

2 files

0.5.2

2 files

0.5.1

2 files

0.5.0

2 files

0.4.27

2 files

0.4.26

2 files

0.4.25

2 files

0.4.24

2 files

0.4.23

2 files

0.4.22

2 files

0.4.21

2 files

0.4.20

2 files

0.4.19

2 files

0.4.18

2 files

0.4.17

2 files

0.4.16

2 files

0.4.15

2 files

0.4.14

2 files

0.4.12

2 files

0.4.11

2 files

0.4.10

2 files

0.4.9

2 files

0.4.8

2 files

0.4.7

2 files

0.4.6

2 files

0.4.5

2 files

0.4.4

2 files

0.4.3

2 files

0.4.2

2 files

0.4.1

2 files

0.3.5

2 files

0.3.4

2 files

0.3.3

2 files

0.3.2

2 files

0.2.7

2 files

0.2.6

2 files

0.2.5

2 files

0.2.4

2 files

0.2.3

2 files

0.1.1

2 files

0.1.0

2 files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page