Rewind
A self-hosted video workshop for anyone who has watched their YouTube research collection get demonetized, age-gated, region-locked, or quietly deleted by the platform that originally hosted it. Rewind is what yt-dlp wants to grow up into: an archiving and search system for video, with automatic transcription, a real clip editor, color filters, crop presets, and a job queue, all running inside a Docker Compose stack that lives on a machine you own.
The footage lives on your disk, the search index lives in your Postgres, and the workflow stops depending on any vendor staying in business, changing their terms, or deciding next year that your content category violates a policy they had not gotten around to writing yet.
Features
Video archival
Save videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and hundreds of other sites through yt-dlp, before they get taken down, age-gated, or paywalled.
Automatic transcription
Whisper turns speech into searchable text, locally, on your hardware. No API quota, no third-party retention.
Transcript search
Find any word across your entire library and jump straight to the timestamp it was spoken at.
Clip editor
Mark in and out points on a zoomable timeline aligned with the subtitle track, then export the clip without rendering the whole video.
Color filters
Stack FFmpeg filters with live preview for repair, emphasis, or alternate output formats, without writing a filter graph by hand.
Crop presets
Define crop regions for 16:9, 9:16, 1:1, and export multiple variants per clip in one pass.
SponsorBlock
Auto-skip sponsor segments on YouTube videos with on-screen notifications, because nobody owes anybody a fifth replay of the same VPN ad.
Markers & comments
Leave timestamped markers, color-code work in progress, and keep imported comments next to the media instead of in a separate spreadsheet.
Remote playback
Control playback on another device with a scene layout editor designed for OBS and streaming workflows.
Admin dashboard
Storage metrics, video-per-day charts, user management, and export queue visibility. The operator screens, treated as real product surface.
Custom keybindings
Rebind every shortcut, including hardware keys F14–F24 for editing controllers and macro pads.
Browser extension
Right-click any video on YouTube to queue it for archival without leaving the page.
Quick start
Rewind ships as a Docker Compose stack. You will need Docker Desktop (which includes Docker Compose) and enough disk space for the archive.
1. Clone and configure
git clone https://github.com/ThirdCoastInteractive/Rewind.git cd Rewind cp .env.example .envOpen .env and fill in POSTGRES_PASSWORD, SESSION_SECRET, and ENCRYPTION_KEY (generate with openssl rand -hex 32).
2. Start
make upOr without make:
docker compose up -d3. Open
Visit http://localhost:8080. Change the port with WEBSERVER_PORT in .env if needed.
How it works
Rewind runs a web UI, a downloader, an ingest worker, an encoder, and Postgres. Each part does one job and one job only. Metadata, transcripts, jobs, and exports stay inside the stack, on your machine, where you can audit and back them up.
GPU acceleration
NVIDIA GPUs can dramatically speed up transcription. Set WHISPER_DEVICE=cuda, install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit, and uncomment the GPU block in the ingest service in docker-compose.yml.
License & source
MIT licensed. Code, issues, and releases live at github.com/ThirdCoastInteractive/Rewind.