Video editing from Rust, without FFmpeg on your machine.

What running FFmpeg from Rust usually costs

• The maintained bindings wrap the C libraries, so building needs the FFmpeg development headers present on the build machine.
• That requirement follows you into cross-compilation and static linking, which are often the reasons Rust was chosen in the first place.
• Shelling out instead avoids the linking but puts a binary back into the image and turns errors into stderr to parse.

Trim a clip and wait for the file

use serde_json::{json, Value};
use std::{env, thread, time::Duration};

const BASE: &str = "https://kinopipe.com/api/v1";

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let key = env::var("KINOPIPE_API_KEY")?;
    let client = reqwest::blocking::Client::new();

    let started: Value = client
        .post(format!("{BASE}/tools/trim-video"))
        .bearer_auth(&key)
        .json(&json!({
            "inputs": [{ "id": "main", "url": "https://example.com/interview.mp4" }],
            "options": { "start": 12, "end": 48 }
        }))
        .send()?
        .json()?;

    let job_id = started["jobId"].as_str().ok_or("no job id in the response")?;

    loop {
        let job: Value = client
            .get(format!("{BASE}/jobs/{job_id}"))
            .bearer_auth(&key)
            .send()?
            .json()?;

        match job["status"].as_str() {
            Some("succeeded") => {
                println!("{}", job["result"]["output"]["downloadUrl"]);
                return Ok(());
            }
            Some("failed") => return Err(job["errorMessage"].to_string().into()),
            _ => thread::sleep(Duration::from_secs(2)),
        }
    }
}

• Two crates, reqwest and serde_json, and no system library. The async version is the same code with await on each call.
• A split job returns every segment under outputs rather than output, which matters if you call split-video or split-video-by-scenes.
• Send an Idempotency-Key header when you retry, and the retry returns the original job instead of paying for a second render.

FAQ