macOS app Version 0.4.0

Kipowi

A player for video and audio that can also cut and export. Open a file, set an in and out point, and write out exactly that part as MP4, MOV, GIF or audio. It plays MKV, which macOS will not, with nothing extra to install. Single images open in a small editor with background removal.

Download 0.4.0 macOS 14+ · free · signed and notarised · 68.4 MB
Third-party source code — for developers, not needed to run Kipowi

One window. The zoom row sits above the timeline, and the strip underneath is the overview you pan with.

What it opens

Video and audio, plus four extras.

Alongside ordinary video and audio it also reads MKV, Blackmagic RAW, folders of numbered frames, and single images. Every source gets the same transport, the same trim handles and the same export panel. What changes is only what genuinely differs: an audio file has no crop, a RAW clip gains a decode-quality control, a folder of frames is asked the one thing stills cannot tell you, which is the frame rate, and a single image has no transport at all because it has no length, so it gets an image editor instead.

Videomov · mp4 · m4v

H.264, HEVC and ProRes. Anything macOS itself decodes.
MKV.mkv

Plays directly rather than converting the whole movie first — conversion happens only when you export. The decoder is inside the app, so there is no VLC, FFmpeg, Homebrew or codec pack to install alongside it.
Audiowav · aiff · flac · mp3 · m4a · aac · alac

No picture, so the viewer becomes a waveform.
Blackmagic RAW.braw

Decoded through Blackmagic's own SDK rather than a proxy, with sound and metadata. Decode quality is a control — full, half, quarter or eighth sensor — so a 6K clip stays scrubbable and still exports at full resolution.
Image sequencespng · tiff · tga · exr · jpeg · webp · heic

Open one frame and it finds the rest of the run.
Single imagesthe same formats

One image with no run behind it opens in the image editor: crop, brightness, contrast and background removal. A photograph opens the right way up, since the rotation in its EXIF tag is applied rather than ignored.

A Blackmagic RAW clip of red helicopters on snow, with the LUT menu open showing None, Blackmagic Gen 5 Film to Extended Video, and Gen 5 Film to Video. — A RAW clip with its LUT menu open. The source line reports sensor size, decode size and frame rate.

An audio file shown as a waveform, with a marked region raised by 4.0 dB and a ramp drawn into and out of it. — A region lifted by 4 dB, with a ramp in and out rather than a step.

Edits

Three, and no more.

TrimI · O

Two handles on the timeline, or set them at the playhead. The kept range loops while you audition it, and is exactly what gets exported.
CropC

Drag the rectangle on the picture or type pixel values, with aspect presets that constrain the drag. Coordinates follow what is on screen, so a portrait clip crops the way it looks rather than the way it is stored.
Gainaudio files

Drag across the waveform to mark a stretch and pull its level up or down by up to 18 dB. Each region ramps to its level instead of stepping. Normalize measures the true peak across every sample and brings it to −1 dBFS, and a CLIP warning appears the moment the settings would pass full scale.

The timeline zooms, which is not a fourth edit but is what makes the first one usable on a long film. Pinch it, or press + and −, until a handle can be placed on the frame you actually meant. Fit puts the whole movie back, and the overview strip underneath pans you around without moving either the trim or the playhead.

Images

Editing a single image.

Open one image and Kipowi is an image editor. Crop it, adjust brightness and contrast, and remove the background. Original shows the picture you started with, Undo steps back, and Reset returns to the untouched file. Export writes a new file: PNG, TIFF or TGA, at full or half size.

Remove Background runs on your own machine, through Apple Vision. Nothing is uploaded and there is no model to download first. What it cuts away shows as a checkerboard, the cutout exports as a transparent PNG, and Restore Background puts it back.

The Kipowi image editor flipping between two states of the same photograph of a man in sunglasses on a boat. First the whole picture, with sky, sea and the boat's wake behind him. Then the same frame with the background gone, a grey checkerboard in its place and only the man left. Brightness and contrast sliders sit along the bottom with Original, Undo and Reset, and the button on the right changes from Remove Background to Restore Background. — Before and after. The checkerboard is what comes out transparent in the exported PNG, and Restore Background puts the background back.

It will not overwrite the original

Export always writes a copy, saving over the source is refused, and an existing output is only replaced once the new file has been written — so a failed export cannot take the old one with it.
Undo

Brightness and contrast, background changes and Reset all step back. Crop drags do not get their own undo entries yet.
Original is a preview

Comparing against the untouched image changes what you see, not what gets written.
Adjusted images are 8-bit SDR

Editing does not carry high dynamic range through.
Background removal is best effort

It depends on the picture and on what the system supports. If it is unavailable or finds no subject, every other control still works. Measured once on Apple silicon with the network denied: 0.54 seconds on a 1920×1080 frame, and the result carried an alpha channel. One sample, not a promise.

Export

It says what it will do first.

The panel states the range, frame rate, output size and estimated file size before it starts, and hides every control that has no meaning for the file in front of it. An audio file is not asked about codecs. A frame stack is not asked about audio.

The export panel: format MOV, MP4, PNG, TIFF or TGA, codec H.264, HEVC or ProRes, quality low to best, scale full or half, audio none to high, and a summary block listing range, length, rate, codec, audio bitrate, size and estimated file size. — The summary block is filled in before you press Export, not after.

Movies

MOV or MP4, H.264, HEVC or ProRes, full or half scale.
Frame stacks

PNG, TIFF with no compression or LZW or ZIP, and TGA.
GIF

With its own size and frame-rate settings. Silent, and it loops. A selection longer than 45 seconds gets a warning first, because that is where the file size stops being reasonable.
Audio

WAV, AIFF, M4A and MP3.
Single pictures

PNG, TIFF or TGA, at full or half scale. Full scale means the pixels as they are, odd dimensions included.
Qualityfour presets

Each preset moves the frame-rate ceiling, keyframe interval and audio bitrate along with the bits-per-pixel target, because on a 60fps source those matter more than the bitrate alone. Sources already at or below 30fps are left alone.
Copy rather than re-encode

Trim the ends off a TIFF sequence, ask for TIFF back, and the frames are copied byte for byte. A single picture written back in the format it arrived in, uncropped and unscaled, is copied the same way. The panel says which it will do before you commit, and for a copy it states the output size exactly rather than estimating it. Re-encoding happens only when a format change, a crop or a scale forces it.

Limits

What 0.4.0 does not do.

MKV is newer than the rest0.3.0

An MKV plays and exports to a movie, but subtitles, LUT preview, frame grabs, image-sequence export and audio-only export are not available for one yet. HDR, rotated and anamorphic MKV video exports are refused rather than written wrong.
GIF is export only

Kipowi writes a GIF; it does not open one. HDR sources cannot be written to GIF.
LUTs are preview only

A graded view still exports ungraded, and frame grabs have the same gap.
Nothing is remembered

LUT choice, decode scale and display aspect all reset between launches.
No timelineby design

No layers and no transitions. One clip in, one clip out. This is a viewer that can finish a file, not an editor.
Pictures write three formats

PNG, TIFF or TGA. A JPEG or HEIC opens fine but comes back out as one of those three.
DPX and Cineon

Not supported, since macOS cannot read them. FLAC opens but cannot be written.
HDR

Passes through untouched. Colour tags are carried faithfully but there is no tone mapping, and EXR decodes through ImageIO so its HDR values are clamped.
6K RAW playback

Tops out near 24 fps, because decode is serial. Lowering the decode quality is the answer for now.

Under the hood

One engine, two front ends.

Decoding and encoding live in a library with no interface, driven by an AVAssetReader and AVAssetWriter pipeline rather than a canned export preset. That is what lets codec, container, crop and scale be chosen independently instead of picked off a fixed list. Orientation, crop, scale and output cadence resolve in one shared place, so the movie exporter and the frame-stack exporter cannot disagree about framing.

The same engine has a command-line front end, which is also how the export paths are tested. 55 unit tests cover decode, export, LUT parsing, geometry and grabs.

Download

Version 0.4.0, free.

Installing

Open the disk image and drag Kipowi to Applications. It is signed with a Developer ID certificate, notarised by Apple and stapled, so it opens without a Gatekeeper warning even on a machine that is offline.

Needs macOS 14 or later. Universal for Apple silicon and Intel. The download is 68.4 MB, most of which is the MKV decoder and the encoders — that weight is the reason there is nothing to install alongside it. No VLC, no FFmpeg, no Homebrew, no codec pack.

0.4.0 adds the image editor, with background removal that runs on your own machine. If something is wrong, tell me.

Source code for the bundled media components

Kipowi carries VLC, VLCKit, FFmpeg and LAME inside the app. Their licences require the matching source to be available next to the binary, so it is: Kipowi-0.4.0-Sources.tar.xz (216 MB), with the patches, dependency sources and build recipes.

You do not need it to run Kipowi. The notices themselves are in the app under Kipowi › Media Component Licenses.

Download 0.4.0 Source code All releases All apps