povcut

Turn Ray-Ban Meta footage into viral shorts with one command.

Your glasses record for hours. Nobody watches hours. povcut finds the 30 seconds worth posting, cuts them into vertical 1080×1920 shorts with captions, and packs each one with a ready-to-paste caption and hashtags.

pip install povcut          # needs ffmpeg on your PATH
povcut pipeline ~/footage   # import -> find moments -> cut -> pack. done.

One folder of POV footage in, a folder of ready-to-post shorts out:

shorts/
  pov_day_moment0_s68/
    clip.mp4      # vertical 1080x1920, burned-in captions
    thumb.jpg     # thumbnail
    caption.txt   # post text + hashtags, ready to paste

Demo

Raw "footage" (24 s, panning test pattern with a loud middle) → povcut pipeline with the tactical HUD → the moment that matters, cut, hooked, and packed. Sample footage, real pipeline:

Why this exists

Every open-source project for Ray-Ban Meta glasses is a developer tool: de-metaified clients, voice bridges to your own agent, IRL streaming rigs, file converters. All brilliant. None of them helps with the thing the glasses are actually for — making content.

POV creators shoot for hours and edit for longer. povcut kills the scrubbing:

• moments — ranks every candidate moment 0–100 by audio energy (laughter, reactions, applause), scene changes, faces on camera, and Shorts-length fit. The loud bits float to the top.
• cut — smart 9:16 crop that follows faces (needs the vision extra, else a clean center crop), karaoke-style burned-in captions, 30 fps, platform-ready H.264.
• HUD overlays — tactical or minimal themes: REC bug, running timecode, progress bar, kinetic lower-third, and an auto hook title card ("wait for it…") in the first 1.5 s. The "how did you film that?" layer.
• spin — rewrites any clip into the Ray-Ban Meta capture structure so Instagram treats it as glasses footage and enables Spin View. Yes, even phone footage.
• pack — every clip ships with a thumbnail, a caption, and hashtags. Paste and post.
• post — dual-track publishing via the shared creator-publish package: Track A — official APIs (YouTube first, then TikTok/Instagram/X/Threads/Bluesky/LinkedIn/Pinterest/Facebook), BYO keys, scheduled in plain English. Track B — a native-posting handoff pack for creators who'd rather post from the app itself.
• stats/tune — an honest experiment: post performance is recorded from day one, and per-creator scoring weights tune themselves only after enough real data exists (≥50 posts, ≥60 days — enforced in code, with kill criteria if there's no signal).

Install

pip install povcut
# optional: face-following crop
pip install "povcut[vision]"
# optional: fully on-device auto captions (free, no API key)
pip install "povcut[auto-captions]"

You need ffmpeg and ffprobe on your PATH (download).

Usage

# the one-command happy path
povcut pipeline ~/MetaAIFootage --top 3

# or step by step
povcut import ~/MetaAIFootage            # deduped, date-organized library
povcut moments clip.mp4 --top 5         # ranked moments with reasons
povcut cut clip.mp4 --top 3             # vertical shorts + packs
povcut cut clip.mp4 --hud tactical      # the comment-bait overlay look
povcut cut clip.mp4 --captions auto     # with on-device transcription
povcut cut clip.mp4 --captions subs.srt # or your own .srt, burned in
povcut spin phone_clip.mp4              # Spin View-ready _SPIN.MOV

# publish (needs: pip install creator-publish)
povcut post clip.mp4 --dry-run                      # validate, post nothing
povcut post clip.mp4 --title "POV: ..."             # YouTube via official API
povcut post clip.mp4 --at "Friday 6pm"              # scheduled, plain English
povcut post clip.mp4 --handoff                      # Track B: native-posting pack
povcut worker                                       # run the publish queue
povcut stats                                        # recorded performance
povcut tune                                         # refuses until enough data

povcut moments prints something like:

[0]     8.0s ->    16.0s  score  67.9  (loud moment (laughter / reaction / applause))
[1]     0.0s ->     6.0s  score  31.7  (scene change)
[2]    18.0s ->    24.0s  score  31.7  (scene change)

How the viral score works

No black box. Each moment gets 0–100 from three honest signals:

Reasons are printed next to every score, and the full ranking lands in moments.json if you want to build on it.

Spin View, explained

Instagram decides a video "came from Meta glasses" by reading its QuickTime structure, not its pixels. povcut spin rewrites any clip into that structure: QuickTime container with the qt brand, ftyp/wide/mdat/moov order, the meta atom as a direct child of moov with the glasses' com.apple.quicktime.* fields, the tapt atom, Core Media handler names, HEVC hvc1 at 1376×1840 / 30 fps, movie timescale 48000, AAC 48 kHz stereo — chunk offsets repointed so the file stays valid.

The structural recipe was reverse-engineered by the public metaspin project (MIT), which compared rebuilds against genuine Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 captures and verified Spin View on a real account. povcut's spin module is an independent implementation of that documented structure, with credit where it's due. No serial numbers or device identifiers are copied — only the shared structure both files have in common.

After every conversion, povcut spin runs a structural self-check (atom order, meta keys, tapt, timescales, chunk offsets inside mdat) and refuses to call it done if anything is off.

Roadmap

• HUD overlays + hook title cards
• Dual-track publishing via the shared creator-publish package
• Performance stats + tuning experiment (kill criteria enforced in code)
• Per-frame crop tracking (smooth subject follow instead of per-clip crop)
• Auto hook titles from transcription, not just moment reasons
• True camera-roll push (companion app)

Contributing

PRs welcome. The test suite generates its own synthetic footage and runs the whole pipeline — python -m unittest discover -s tests. No API keys, no accounts, no network needed.

License

MIT. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Meta Platforms or EssilorLuxottica.