Feather

Make videos, images, GIFs and PDFs lighter — entirely on your device.

Feather is a fast, open-source media compressor for macOS (Windows & Linux builds coming). Drop files in, pick a quality, get smaller files. Nothing is uploaded, ever.

<p align="center"> <video src="public/feather-trailer.mp4" width="820" autoplay loop muted playsinline></video> </p> <p align="center"><a href="public/feather-trailer.mp4">▶ Watch the trailer</a></p> <p align="center"> <a href="https://github.com/FirasLatrech/feather/releases/latest">Download</a> · <a href="#cli--mcp-ai-agents">CLI & MCP</a> </p> <p align="center"><i>Video · Image · GIF · PDF — hardware-accelerated, batch, folder watching, CLI + MCP</i></p>

Download

Easiest — one line in Terminal (downloads the latest release, installs to Applications, and grants it access to open):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FirasLatrech/feather/main/install.sh | sh

Or grab the .dmg from the latest release →. Feather isn't notarized yet (it's open source, not signed by a paid Apple developer account), so if you install the dmg by hand macOS says "Feather is damaged" — it isn't; run xattr -cr /Applications/Feather.app once and open it.

FFmpeg is downloaded by Feather itself on first launch if you don't have it. Ghostscript (PDF only) can be installed from Settings.

Features

• Video — H.264 / H.265 / VP9 / AV1, hardware encoding (Apple VideoToolbox) always on, target file size, resize, frame rate, trim, remove audio, video → GIF, extract MP3. Bitrate-aware: never spends more bits than the source.
• Images — JPG (mozjpeg), PNG (oxipng), WebP, AVIF, HEIC/TIFF input, resize, keep metadata. Never produces a larger file.
• GIF — per-file palette + dithering, resize, fps.
• PDF — Ghostscript presets from print quality to screen.
• Batch with bounded parallelism, live speed × / ETA, size & time estimates before you press Compress.
• Auto-compress: watch folders (e.g. Downloads) and compress whatever lands there; optionally replace the original.
• Per-file setting overrides, output folder / naming templates, replace-in-place, move to Trash, keep dates.
• History with stats, notifications, light/dark theme.

CLI & MCP (AI agents)

Feather ships feather-cli inside the app bundle (Feather.app/Contents/MacOS/feather-cli) — a command-line tool and an MCP server, so Claude, Cursor or any MCP client can compress files on your machine.

# Terminal
feather-cli compress ~/Movies/*.mp4 --quality good --max 1920
feather-cli compress photo.heic --format webp --out ~/Desktop
feather-cli probe video.mov · feather-cli estimate *.png --quality medium · feather-cli history

# Claude Code
claude mcp add feather -- /Applications/Feather.app/Contents/MacOS/feather-cli mcp

# Claude Desktop / Cursor (mcp.json)
{ "mcpServers": { "feather": { "command": "/Applications/Feather.app/Contents/MacOS/feather-cli", "args": ["mcp"] } } }

MCP tools: compress (paths, quality, format, max, out, replace, no_audio, codec, target_mb — with progress notifications), probe, estimate, history. Destructive options (replace) are only applied when passed explicitly. Settings → AI agents · MCP shows the exact commands with copy buttons.

Requirements

• macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon or Intel)
• FFmpeg — brew install ffmpeg
• Ghostscript for PDFs (optional) — brew install ghostscript

Development

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev          # desktop app
pnpm dev                # UI only, in the browser with a mocked backend (add ?demo=files)
cd src-tauri && FEATHER_SAMPLES=/path/to/samples cargo test   # engine tests against real ffmpeg/gs

Stack: Tauri 2 (Rust) · React · TypeScript · Vite. Engine: FFmpeg for video/GIF, Ghostscript for PDF, pure-Rust image codecs (image, mozjpeg, oxipng, webp, ravif).

Screenshots

Drop zone	Dark theme, batch running

Contributing

Issues and PRs are welcome. Run pnpm tauri dev for the app, pnpm dev for the UI in a browser (mock backend, ?demo=files|running|done), and cargo test in src-tauri (set FEATHER_SAMPLES to a folder with sample media to run the encoder tests).

Roadmap

See PLAN.md.

License

MIT © Firas Latrach