Reddit Romantics Automation

Local story-to-video automation for long-form YouTube videos and cliffhanger Shorts.

Workflow

Each story gets exactly one user-facing workspace:

runs/2026-08-16_16-27-short-story-title/
  story.md
  narration.wav
  transcript.json
  captions.ass
  full.mp4
  short.wav
  short-transcript.json
  short-captions.ass
  short.mp4
  thumbnail.png

runs/ is local and gitignored. Temporary model/runtime work remains under .work/.

The intended production flow is:

1. Generate the story.
2. Review/refine it.
3. Save only the refined script to story.md.
4. Generate narration once. Fish Audio S2 Pro is the default; Gemini and VibeVoice remain optional overrides.
5. The reviewed story contains exactly one [[SHORTS_CLIFFHANGER]] marker on its own line after the chosen cliffhanger sentence.
6. The pipeline strips that marker before TTS, transcribes once with WhisperX, and renders full.mp4.
7. It aligns the pre-marker story words to transcript.json, derives the cutoff timestamp programmatically, and renders short.mp4 automatically. TTS and WhisperX are not rerun.
8. Save the final thumbnail as thumbnail.png in the same run folder.

There are no root input/ or output/ directories in the new workflow.

Skills

The story skills now live in this repository under skills/:

• reddit-story - story coordinator.
• reddit-story-genres - genre-specific behavior.
• reddit-story-hooks - opening-hook guidance.
• reddit-story-review - refinement pass.
• reddit-story-thumbnail - thumbnail generation guidance.
• reddit-story-video - minimal instructions for driving this local pipeline and producing the full video + Short.

Supported narration engines

Only these three providers are maintained:

• Gemini TTS - API-based narration, up to two speakers.
• Microsoft VibeVoice 1.5B - local long-form narration with reusable presets.
• Fish Audio S2 Pro - local native Windows s2.cpp, full unquantized F16 model, 20 CUDA transformer layers by default.

For Fish, production stories carry non-spoken gender=male / gender=female speaker metadata. The pipeline auto-casts male speakers to Ethan and female speakers to Sarah. --speaker-preset ID=PRESET is an optional override. Gemini and VibeVoice still require explicit per-speaker voices.

Setup

Requirements: Windows, Python 3.11, uv, Git, FFmpeg/FFprobe, and an NVIDIA GPU for the local accelerated paths.

.\setup.ps1

For Gemini, set GOOGLE_API_KEY in .env.

CLI

Create a run first:

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe main.py new-run --title "my story"

Write the reviewed story to the printed folder's story.md. For unattended or scheduled production, enqueue the run instead of waiting for the heavy pipeline in the caller session:

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe main.py enqueue `
  --run-dir runs\2026-08-16_16-27_my-story

enqueue ensures a detached worker is alive, sends the run to that worker's in-memory FIFO queue over localhost IPC, and returns immediately. You can enqueue any number of runs while that worker is alive, and it processes exactly one video at a time. When the queue drains the worker exits; its queue disappears with it. A later worker always starts with an empty queue, so stale jobs are never recovered after a crash or restart. Per-job logs remain under .work/video-queue/logs/, but pending/running queue state is not persisted.

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe main.py queue-status

Use main.py run only when you intentionally want a synchronous foreground generation, such as manual debugging.

Gemini synchronous example:

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe main.py run `
  --run-dir runs\2026-08-16_16-27_my-story `
  --tts gemini `
  --speaker-preset 0=Kore `
  --speaker-preset 1=Puck

VibeVoice synchronous example:

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe main.py run `
  --run-dir runs\2026-08-16_16-27_my-story `
  --tts vibevoice `
  --speaker-preset 0=Alice `
  --speaker-preset 1=Frank

Default Fish synchronous example:

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe main.py run `
  --run-dir runs\2026-08-16_16-27_my-story

The story metadata decides whether each slot uses the male or female default voice. Add --speaker-preset ID=PRESET only when you intentionally want to override that automatic casting.

Both queued and synchronous runs create short.mp4 automatically when story.md contains [[SHORTS_CLIFFHANGER]]. There is no separate AI cliffhanger-selection step and no manual timestamp argument.

main.py list shows existing runs, backgrounds, caption themes, VibeVoice presets, and saved Fish presets.

Gradio UI

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe app.py

The UI now writes through the same run-folder pipeline. The default full-video mode keeps the background source dimensions.

Project structure

app.py
main.py
setup.ps1
skills/
reddit_video/
  pipeline.py
  job_queue.py
  runs.py
  captions.py
  tts.py
  fish.py
  tts_text.py
gemini-tts/
videos/
voice_presets/
patches/
runs/        # generated, gitignored
.work/       # internal, gitignored
vendor/      # runtimes/models, gitignored

Tests

.\.venv\Scripts\python.exe -m pytest -q