VidNo has specific hardware and software requirements because it runs AI inference, video processing, and voice synthesis locally on your machine. Here is the full breakdown.
Operating system: Linux is required. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS or newer is recommended and is the primary development and testing target. Other Debian-based distributions (Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Debian 12) work well. Fedora and Arch are community-supported but not officially tested. macOS support is planned but not yet available. Windows is not supported natively — WSL2 with NVIDIA GPU passthrough can work but is not officially supported.
CPU: Any modern multi-core processor. 8 cores or more recommended. The CPU handles OCR, frame extraction, and video compositing. An Intel i7/i9 or AMD Ryzen 7/9 from the last three generations will be comfortable.
RAM: 32GB minimum, 64GB recommended. VidNo loads video frames into memory during analysis, and the OCR pipeline is memory-intensive when processing high-resolution recordings. 16GB will cause out-of-memory errors on recordings longer than 20 minutes.
GPU: NVIDIA with 12GB+ VRAM and CUDA support. See the GPU requirements FAQ for specific model benchmarks. AMD GPUs are not supported.
Storage: 100GB of free disk space minimum. Screen recordings are large files, and VidNo creates intermediate artifacts during processing (extracted frames, audio files, composited segments) before cleaning up. An SSD is strongly recommended — HDD speeds will bottleneck the frame extraction phase significantly.
Software dependencies: Node.js 20 or newer, FFmpeg (installed via apt), NVIDIA drivers with CUDA toolkit, and a Claude API key from Anthropic. The VidNo installer checks for all dependencies and guides you through installing anything missing.
Network: An internet connection is required only for the Claude API call during script generation. All other processing is fully offline. Typical bandwidth usage per video is minimal — a few kilobytes of text sent and received.