travel-animator

Render videos for the Travel Animator app.

A companion to the Travel Animator service; it needs an account. See licence for the terms.

The Python import path is tada_render.

Install

pip install travel-animator

Requirements: Python 3.12+, an OpenGL implementation (a GPU driver in production, Mesa/llvmpipe for CPU-only use on Linux), and FFmpeg/PyAV's usual runtime libraries.

Linux, macOS, and Windows are all supported. On Windows the GL context comes from WGL, which needs an interactive desktop session: a service (session 0) cannot create one, and there is no software-render fallback as on Linux.

For the MCP server, install the mcp extra:

pip install "travel-animator[mcp]"

The extra keeps the MCP SDK out of the base install (and out of the GPU worker's dependency set — the renderer itself never imports it).

CLI

Console script: travel-animator.

travel-animator login           # interactive magic-link login, or store a bearer token
travel-animator logout          # remove locally stored credentials (local only; see below)
travel-animator render-bundle   # render a prepared, offline bundle to MP4
travel-animator mcp             # run the stdio MCP server (requires the `mcp` extra, below)

login authenticates against the same account system the Travel Animator mobile app uses. With no argument on an interactive terminal it runs a magic-link flow (email -> 6-digit code); with a token argument, -, or piped stdin it stores a bearer token directly (for CI). Credentials are written to ~/.config/tada/credentials.json (or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/tada/credentials.json) with mode 0600 — the same XDG-style location on every platform; %APPDATA% is not used. On Windows 0600 is a no-op beyond the read-only bit, so protection comes from the ACLs your user profile already grants.

logout removes whatever is stored locally. There is currently no server-side session revocation: a stolen credentials file remains valid at the login service until it naturally expires. logout only stops this machine from presenting it.

render-bundle renders a prepared bundle with no network access. Its --encoder default is libx264, which runs anywhere; pass --encoder h264_nvenc for NVIDIA hardware encoding. Run travel-animator render-bundle --help for the full flag reference.

MCP server

The mcp extra adds travel-animator mcp, a stdio MCP server that lets an AI assistant do the whole job for you: plan a route, tune how the animation looks, and render the video. A typical MCP client configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "travel-animator-mcp": {
      "command": "travel-animator",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Run travel-animator login in a terminal first — tools that need a credential fail with a clear message telling you to do so, and auth_status lets an agent check before it builds a trip it cannot render.

Licence

travel-animator is published under a limited use licence, not an open-source licence. In short: you may install and run it unmodified to prepare and render Travel Animator content and to talk to Lascade's services. You may not redistribute it, modify it, or build a competing service with it. The full terms ship inside the package at tada_render/LICENSE.

The bundled fonts (SIL Open Font License 1.1) and flag artwork (MIT) are third-party assets under their own licences, which that restriction does not touch. Their notices and full licence texts are in tada_render/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

For redistribution or modification rights, contact Lascade.