Video-Browser: Towards Agentic Open-web Video Browsing

VideoBrowser is an autonomous AI agent designed to research, watch, and analyze video content to answer complex user queries. It implements the Pyramidal Perception for efficient video understanding.

🚀 Quick Start

1. Installation

Clone the repository and install dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/your-username/Video-Browser.git
cd Video-Browser

# Recommended: Create a virtual environment
conda create -n videobrowser python=3.10
conda activate videobrowser

pip install -r requirements.txt
pip install -e .

3. Environment Setup

Create a .env file in the project root to store your API keys: cp .env.example .env

# .env file

# Required: Core LLM Logic
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-your_openai_api_key_here

# Optional: Enhanced Search & Transcripts
# OXYLABS_USERNAME=your_username (For robust YouTube scraping)
# OXYLABS_PASSWORD=your_password
# TAVILY_API_KEY=tvly-... (For web text search)

4. Configuration (config.yaml)

Control the agent's behavior by editing config.yaml. The defaults are optimized for general use.

Key Settings:

llm:
  default:
    provider: "openai"
    model: "gpt-4o"  # Recommended model

watcher:
  num_frames: 16             # How many frames to "skim" initially
  video_downloader: "pytubefix" # Options: "pytubefix" (faster) or "ytdlp" (more robust)

selector:
  top_k: 3                   # Max videos to process per search round

transcript:
  provider: "whisper"        # Options: "whisper" (OpenAI API), "ytdlp" (subtitles), "oxylabs"

5. Running the Agent

You can run the agent using the graph builder script:

python run_cli.py

Note: By default, this runs a demo query defined in the script. Open run_cli.py and modify the inputs dictionary to change the question.

6. Running the Web UI

To use the interactive Chat UI (powered by Chainlit):

chainlit run app.py

This will start a local server at http://localhost:8000. You can interact with the agent just like a chat application.

📚 Citation

If you use the videobrowser in your research, please cite:

@misc{liang2026videobrowseragenticopenwebvideo,
      title={Video-Browser: Towards Agentic Open-web Video Browsing}, 
      author={Zhengyang Liang and Yan Shu and Xiangrui Liu and Minghao Qin and Kaixin Liang and Nicu Sebe and Zheng Liu and Lizi Liao},
      year={2026},
      eprint={2512.23044},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CV},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.23044}, 
}

📄 License

MIT License

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