Crazy Video Glitch Editor

Take a clip, destroy it on the beat. A desktop video glitch editor for datamosh, channel lobotomy, pixel-sort melt, frame-granular synthesis and audio-reactive chaos — with a live preview and a real ffmpeg/opencv render backend.

What it is

A headless glitch engine (glitchcore/, no Qt) plus a PySide6 desktop GUI. Every effect can fire on detected beats and react to the audio, so a render is chopped, reordered and corrupted in time with the music instead of by hand. It ships with multi-layer compositing, frame-granular synthesis (a video grain cloud and matching granular audio from the same schedule), a one-button Auto-Lobotomizer, optical-flow datamosh, GPU shaders, a node-graph mode, and live performance control (gamepad / MIDI / webcam / screen → a virtual cam).

The engine is fully scriptable on its own — the command-line renderer uses it directly, with no GUI in the loop.

Pixel-sort melt	Auto-Lobotomizer (time-warp + glitch chain)

Download

Prebuilt, ffmpeg-bundled binaries are on the releases page — nothing else to install:

Platform	File	First run
Linux	CrazyVideoGlitchEditor-linux-x86_64.AppImage	chmod +x *.AppImage && ./*.AppImage
Windows	coming soon	unzip, run CrazyVideoGlitchEditor.exe
macOS	coming soon	unzip; unsigned, so right-click → Open

Until then, Windows/macOS users can run from source or build locally — see packaging/BUILD.md.

The editor is cross-platform. Two features are Linux-only as built: webcam capture (/dev/video*) and the PipeWire audio path; the "Go Live" virtual cam needs OBS on Windows/macOS. Everything else works everywhere.

Run from source

pip install -r requirements.txt
./run.sh                      # or: python3 main.py

Batch render from the command line (no GUI — two positional args switch to CLI):

python3 main.py in.mp4 out.mp4 --preset brainfuck --datamosh --speed 1.5 --seed 42

Requires ffmpeg + ffprobe on PATH. Encoding uses h264_nvenc (NVIDIA) when available and falls back to libx264. Optional extras: torch enables real MiDaS depth in Depth Displace; live features need system portaudio (audio) and v4l2loopback (virtual cam); GPU shaders need a working GL context.

./install.sh adds a desktop launcher (app menu + Desktop) for double-click launch.

How it works

• Effects (glitchcore/effects.py) — every effect subclasses Effect and declares its parameters; the GUI builds the controls for it automatically. The base class handles beat-sync and audio modulation for free, so an effect's strength is beat_gate × amount × audio every frame.
• Beat sync — beats and onsets are detected with librosa from the first video layer (or an imported soundtrack). Each effect runs always, as a decaying pulse after each beat, or hard-gated for a hold time, optionally only every Nth beat.
• Audio-reactive — each effect can track an audio band (rms/bass/mid/ high) so loudness drives grain density, bass drives zoom punches, highs drive RGB tear, and so on.
• Compositing — Chain (ordered effects) → Layer (a source + placement + blend + its own chain) → Timeline (layers composited bottom-to-top with blend modes). A layer's source is a video, a granulator, or a live webcam/ screen, and a beat-driven time-warp can remap a layer's content time against a steady music bed (freeze / ramp / reverse / jump).
• Frame granular synthesis (granular.py) — a clip is shattered into a cloud of windowed frame grains scattered in space and time. The same grain schedule drives the audio granulator, so picture and sound granulate in lockstep.
• Datamosh (datamosh.py) — the real thing: frames are encoded to an mpeg4 AVI with recurring I-frames, then I-frames are stripped at the byte level so P-frame motion vectors bloom over the wrong content. Not a shader fake.

For the full architecture, see CLAUDE.md.

Effects

Effect	What it does
RGB Shift	Chromatic channel tear, optional wobble
Channel Lobotomy	Bit-crush + channel swap + channel kill
Camera Shake	Per-frame jitter
Zoom Punch	Scale-in hit (defaults to beat pulse)
Stutter / Freeze	Latch a frame on the beat and repeat it
Frame Shuffle	Jump to a random recent frame on the beat
Echo / Trails	Feedback smear (datamosh-ish)
Pixel Sort	Brightness-sorted pixel melt (H/V)
Slice Displace	Random horizontal tear bands
Wave Warp	Sinusoidal row displacement
Strobe / Invert	Beat-flash invert / white / black
Databend (JPEG)	Real JPEG byte-corruption glitch
VHS / Decay	Scanlines + chroma bleed + noise
Optical Datamosh	Motion-vector melt (DIS optical flow)
Flow Smear	Push the frame along its own motion
Depth Displace	Parallax keyed by depth (MiDaS or luminance)

Presets: brainfuck, seizure, datamoshhell, vapordecay, pixelmelt, motionmelt. Export to mp4 / webm / gif at source / 1080p / 720p / 480p.

Inspiration

• Lobotomy-core edits — chopped clips, playback glitches, freeze-before-the- sting, hard cut after, over breakcore. The chop-reorder-beat-sync blueprint behind layers and granular.
• Video Granular Synthesis — Forbes, Computational Aesthetics 2015 (pdf): grains as frame/time-slices cloned and scattered into clouds. The model behind granular.py.
• Glitch art / digital anti-art — Rosa Menkman, JODI, databending and datamoshing (overview). The why behind Databend and Datamosh.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Copyright (c) 2026 willbearfruits.