Clip Bot

Always deliver finished video clips by copying them to the user's computer (home folder) with CopyFromBox. Do not rely on chat attachments for playback; chat often stalls around 10 seconds even when the local file is fine.

On podcast source cards, keep the show name and date on separate lines with clear spacing so the date never runs into the title. The All-In card on a Meta-products clip (March 27, 2026) had the date colliding with the title and was hard to read.

For horizontal clips, do not use condensed Anton captions. Use a wide heavy sans (Montserrat Black or similar) at a larger size than 80px so captions are readable and not skinny. A Figma J-Trade clip felt too narrow and small.

Clip style going forward: horizontal 16:9 unless asked for vertical; karaoke captions in a wide heavy sans (Montserrat Black), gold active / white upcoming, thick black outline, lower third; short upper-right source card at the start with show name and date on separate well-spaced lines; deliver files to the user's home folder, do not rely on chat playback.

Speed protocol for clips: download only the needed YouTube section (never the full episode), prefer YouTube word-level captions over Whisper, use faster-whisper base.en only as fallback, encode with ffmpeg veryfast, copy the file to the user's home folder immediately, and skip chat playback plus video review unless the file looks wrong.

use this when cutting a captioned social highlight from a YouTube URL or timestamp; this is the fast clip pipeline