Cinestar

Mac · Linux

Freedom report

Two barsScore 6.4

Cinestar is ranked #3 of 24 in AI video search tools on Freedom251. It runs on Linux, macOS. There is a free plan.

Cinestar plans and pricing

Cinestar (MIT open-source core) Free Open-source core; local AI services require Ollama cinestar.sourceforge.io · 4 Oct 2026

Purpose: Cinestar searches images and videos using local AI.
Media ingestion: It can ingest folders or videos, transcribe audio with Whisper, embed frames with BGE, and generate captions with Moondream.
Search results: Natural-language queries return moments with timecodes and thumbnails.
Indexing: Cinestar stores vectors in SQLite-Vec and uses Llama 3.2 to process and organize content.
Privacy: The maker says AI processing runs locally and that Cinestar has no analytics, telemetry, usage tracking, or data uploads.
Models: The site lists BGE embeddings, Moondream v2 for image and video captions, and Llama 3.2 (3B) for language tasks.
Intended users: The maker presents personal media managers, content creators, media organizations, and academic or market researchers as use cases.
License: The site identifies Cinestar as open source under the MIT license.
Setup requirement: The install guide says Ollama is required for local AI services and lists BGE, Moondream, and Llama 3.2 models totaling about 2–4 GB to download.
macOS install: The install guide provides steps for downloading Cinestar.app, moving it to Applications, and opening it past Gatekeeper.
Linux install: The install guide includes Linux commands for installing Ollama and names Linux in the site's Mac/Linux install link.
Release information: The changelog lists v0.1.52, dated October 11, 2025, as the latest release on that page.
Price from: Free

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