Installing VidNo takes about 10 minutes. The process has four steps: download, run the installer, configure your API key, and record your voice sample.
Step one: download. Grab the latest release from the VidNo downloads page. You will get a compressed archive — vidno-latest.tar.gz. Extract it to wherever you want VidNo to live. Most users put it in their home directory or /opt.
Step two: run the installer. Open a terminal, navigate to the extracted directory, and run ./install.sh. This script checks your system for all required dependencies — Node.js 20+, FFmpeg, NVIDIA drivers, CUDA toolkit — and installs anything missing (with your confirmation). It sets up the VidNo CLI so you can run vidno commands from anywhere in your terminal.
Step three: configure your Claude API key. Run vidno config and paste your Claude API key when prompted. If you do not have one yet, sign up at console.anthropic.com, navigate to API Keys, and create a new key. VidNo stores the key in ~/.vidno/config.json on your local machine. The key is never sent anywhere except Anthropic's API endpoint during script generation.
Step four: record your voice sample. Run vidno voice-setup and follow the prompts. You will read a provided paragraph out loud for about 60 seconds. Speak naturally — use your normal talking voice, not a performance voice. The quality of this sample directly affects how good your AI narration sounds. Record in a quiet environment, speak at a comfortable pace, and avoid background noise. VidNo processes the sample on your GPU to create a local voice model, which takes 2-5 minutes depending on your hardware.
After these four steps, you are ready to process your first recording. Run vidno process your-recording.mp4 and VidNo handles everything from there.
If anything fails during installation, the installer outputs specific error messages with suggested fixes. The most common issues are outdated NVIDIA drivers and missing CUDA toolkit, both of which the installer can resolve automatically on Ubuntu systems.