dsh-reelsmaker

A DeepSeek Harness plugin that turns lines of narration into a finished vertical reel — spoken, captioned, 1080×1920, ready to upload.

No API key. No account. No ffmpeg.

you:  make a reel about why my tool needs no API key
dsh:  [make_reel] Rendering a 5-beat reel…
      Rendered 16.4s reel (5 beats): out/why-my-tool-needs-no-api-key.mp4

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Install

dsh plugin add dsh-reelsmaker

Or try it without the harness at all:

git clone https://github.com/aayan-cloud/dsh-reelsmaker
cd dsh-reelsmaker && npm install
node lib/make-reel.js "Every reel here is just a text file." "No editor, and nothing dragged onto a timeline." "Free, and open source."

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Why this exists

Every voice plugin in the harness ecosystem today either wants an API key or falls back to browser speech, and the video plugins render one fixed style.

This uses Microsoft Edge's neural TTS — the engine behind Edge's Read Aloud — which is free and needs no account, and renders with Remotion, so the whole chain runs on hardware you already own.

The agent writes the words. This makes the video. The tool takes finished narration lines rather than a topic on purpose: the harness already has a model that writes better copy than any template would, so generating the script internally would replace a good writer with a worse one.

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The tool

make_reel — each line becomes one beat, spoken and shown on screen.

parameter
lines	required	4–6 narration lines, under ~12 words each
title		output filename, defaults to the first line
outDir		where the MP4 lands
voice		Edge voice id, e.g. en-US-AriaNeural
rate		speaking rate, e.g. +12%

Returns { path, seconds, beats }.

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Two decisions worth knowing about

Beat lengths are measured, never estimated. A beat has to be exactly as long as the line spoken over it. Guessing from character count is close, and close compounds — across six beats the captions end up a third of a second off the voice, which reads as broken rather than as a small error. So the pipeline speaks first, counts the MPEG frames in each MP3 to get an exact duration, and only then times the beats. There is no ffmpeg anywhere; the frame headers are parsed directly.

Captions are burned in, not optional. Short-form is watched muted by default, so a reel whose story lives only in the voice track is a reel most viewers never receive. Every line is spoken and shown. The audio is an upgrade for people who turn it on, never a dependency.

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Loading it from source on Windows

The harness tutorial says a local plugin path "must be absolute". That is true on Unix and not sufficient on Windows: a bare C:/... path reaches Node's ESM loader as protocol c: and throws ERR_UNSUPPORTED_ESM_URL_SCHEME before the plugin loads. Use a file:// URL:

- insert:
    - id: reelsmaker
      name: 'file:///C:/path/to/dsh-reelsmaker/index.js'

dsh web --patch ./dev-patch.yml

Set REELSMAKER_PROBE=1 to print a line when the plugin registers, which is how you tell "loaded and registered" apart from "the config composed but nothing ran".

Known limits

• The render is foreground. It takes 30s–3min depending on length, and the call blocks for that time. Moving it to ctx.jobs.start() as a background job is the obvious upgrade; it is not done yet.
• One visual style. Narrated statements on a drifting gradient. It suits explainer and announcement reels; it is not a product-video tool. For cinematic product work see video-shotcraft.
• DeepSeek Harness is in developer preview and promises compatibility-breaking changes, so this will need maintenance.

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Licence

MIT for the code here. Remotion is not MIT — it is free for individuals and companies of up to three people, and larger companies need a paid company licence. See https://remotion.dev/license.