Getting Started

Getting Started

Zegplayer is an Electron desktop app. It does the orchestration and UI; the heavy lifting (transcription, AI notes, YouTube download) is done by external command-line tools you install yourself and keep on your PATH.

1. Install the external tools

Tool	Purpose	Required?
ffmpeg / ffprobe	Audio/video processing & inspection	Yes
whisper-cli	Local transcription (whisper.cpp)	Yes
yt-dlp	Loading videos from YouTube URLs	Only for YouTube
An AI CLI or local model server	Note generation: one of claude / codex / opencode, or LM Studio / Ollama	Yes (at least one)

macOS

brew install ffmpeg yt-dlp
brew install whisper-cpp        # provides whisper-cli

Windows

winget install ffmpeg
winget install yt-dlp.yt-dlp
# whisper-cli: build/download from whisper.cpp

Linux

sudo apt install ffmpeg
sudo apt install yt-dlp   # or: pipx install yt-dlp
# whisper-cli: build/download from whisper.cpp

Then install at least one AI CLI (claude, codex, opencode) or run a local model server (LM Studio / Ollama).

See Platform Support for what currently works per-OS — some in-app install helpers are macOS-only today.

2. Install Zegplayer

Download the installer for your platform from Releases. The released builds are unsigned, so you must bypass your OS security gate the first time:

• macOS: right-click → Open, or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Zegplayer.app"
• Windows: SmartScreen → More info → Run anyway

3. First run

1. Open Zegplayer.
2. Open Connected Services and confirm at least one Speech provider (whisper) and one Agent/Local-AI provider are detected. See Connected Services.
3. Load a video (local file or YouTube URL). Transcription starts automatically.
4. Scrub to a moment and generate a timestamped note.
5. Optionally Connect MCP so your agent can query your transcripts and notes — see MCP Server.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/megz2020/zegplayer.git
cd zegplayer
npm install        # postinstall rebuilds better-sqlite3 for Electron
npm run dev        # run in development