What needs to exist before the first render.

The whole checklist, copy and paste

Everything below in one block. It checks what you already have before installing anything, because most machines are already most of the way there. Pick your platform.

# 1. Check what you already have
node --version        # need 20 or newer
ffmpeg -version       # need 4.0 or newer

# 2. Install whatever was missing. Reopen the terminal after ffmpeg,
#    winget only puts it on PATH for new shells.
winget install --id Gyan.FFmpeg -e
npm install playwright && npx playwright install chromium
pip install -U edge-tts  # narration, optional, 7.3 or newer

# 3. Start the app you want to film, then ask your agent:
#    "run preflight against http://localhost:3000"

# 1. Check what you already have
node --version        # need 20 or newer
ffmpeg -version       # need 4.0 or newer

# 2. Install whatever was missing
brew install ffmpeg
npm install playwright && npx playwright install chromium
pip install -U edge-tts  # narration, optional, 7.3 or newer

# 3. Start the app you want to film, then ask your agent:
#    "run preflight against http://localhost:3000"

# 1. Check what you already have
node --version        # need 20 or newer
ffmpeg -version       # need 4.0 or newer

# 2. Install whatever was missing
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y ffmpeg
npm install playwright && npx playwright install chromium
pip install -U edge-tts  # narration, optional, 7.3 or newer

# 3. Start the app you want to film, then ask your agent:
#    "run preflight against http://localhost:3000"

Required

• Node.js 20 or newer

  The one version preflight enforces numerically. It runs the server, and npm comes with it for the Playwright install line below.

• git and pnpm, only to run from source

  The normal install is npx, which needs neither. To run the server from a clone, to contribute or to try unreleased changes, you need git and pnpm (npm install -g pnpm, or corepack enable).

• An MCP capable agent

  Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, Claude Desktop, or any client that speaks MCP. This is the only interface openvidstudio has.

• Playwright 1.48 or newer, plus Chromium

  The capture tools drive a real browser. The playwright dependency downloads Chromium on install; if that step was skipped, capture fails at the first screenshot.

• ffmpeg 4.0 or newer

  Used to pull QC frames back out of a render, and to synthesize the sound effect pack with scripts/gen-sfx.sh. Not version checked, but every filter the pipeline uses has been in ffmpeg since the 3.x era.

• Your app, running

  Capture points a browser at a real URL. If there is nothing serving, there is nothing to film.

Optional

• edge-tts, or another text to speech source

  The default narration engine, installed with pip and needing Python 3.8 or newer. Use edge-tts 7.3 or newer: 7.2.8 was refused by the Microsoft speech service in October 2026, and pip install -U edge-tts fixes it. Lessons need a voice, so for them this is required. Preflight treats it as non-blocking, so a render still succeeds without it and simply plays silent. Anything that can write an mp3 per beat works instead.

• A Higgsfield subscription

  Only for the b roll tier, and only for shots with no product UI in them. Your subscription, your MCP connection.

• numpy, scipy, soundfile, pyloudnorm, matplotlib

  Python libraries that compose_score needs to write and check an original score. Install them with pip. Nothing else in the pipeline uses them.

• A music bed

  A track at public/audio/music-bed.mp3 if you want one. compose_score writes an original one, and find_music_bed searches public-domain catalogs.

Two things that fail silently

Neither of these throws. Both produce a video that renders successfully and is quietly wrong, which is worse than a crash.

On Windows

• npx remotion skills add fails with spawn EINVAL. Run npx -y skills@1.2.0 add remotion-dev/skills instead.
• A render that dies on a webpack wasm-hash error usually clears by deleting node_modules/.cache and retrying.
• Run npm and pnpm commands from the project's own directory. Some agent harnesses reset the working directory between tool calls.