I Open-Sourced TopicMiner

#videoediting #opensource #python #backboardio

I Open-Sourced TopicMiner

Turn One Long Video Into Dozens of Branded Shorts

Most video repurposing tools are either too shallow, too closed, or too annoying to customize.

So I open-sourced TopicMiner.

TopicMiner is built for a simple but painful workflow: you have a podcast, webinar, interview, or long-form video, and you want to turn it into short, branded, vertical clips without manually chopping everything up for hours.

It handles:

local transcription
VTT caption generation
agentic video editing
branded short-form clip creation
Stripe payments

It’s built on Backboard.io, which means it’s not just a one-off toy project — it’s part of a bigger architecture for building serious AI-native apps.

What TopicMiner does

TopicMiner helps turn long-form content into short-form assets that are actually usable for distribution.

Think:

podcast to TikTok clips
webinar to YouTube Shorts
interview to branded social snippets
long videos to multiple cutdowns with captions

The goal wasn’t “AI for the sake of AI.”

The goal was to make content repurposing feel less like punishment.

Why I open sourced it

Because a lot of people want to build AI video workflows, but most examples out there are:

thin wrappers
black boxes
impossible to self-host
hard to extend
not wired for real product flows like billing

I wanted to put out something more real.

TopicMiner shows how to build an actual app around AI workflows — not just a demo, but a product-shaped system with media processing, transcription, editing logic, and payments.

What’s under the hood

At a high level, TopicMiner includes:

local-first transcription workflows
caption generation with VTT
agent-driven editing flow
branding-oriented short clip pipeline
Stripe integration for payments

If you’re building in the intersection of:

AI agents
creator tools
media workflows
transcription pipelines
OSS SaaS

…this repo should be useful.

Why this matters

Short-form distribution is one of the biggest leverage points in content right now.

But the workflow is still painfully manual.

A lot of creators and teams are sitting on hours of valuable long-form content that never gets repackaged because the process is too slow. TopicMiner is my take on closing that gap with an open-source stack you can actually inspect and build on.