A company-agnostic video engineering skill for Claude (Cowork / Claude Code). Covers the full video delivery stack — encoding, packaging, player integration, and DRM — with honest, vendor-neutral guidance across both open-source tools and commercial infrastructure providers.
Rather than prescribing a stack upfront, the skill asks diagnostic questions (device targets, scale, DRM needs, budget) and routes to the right recommendation:
- Open-source — ffmpeg ABR encoding, HLS/DASH packaging, hls.js, Shaka Player, AVPlayer (iOS), ExoPlayer (Android)
- Commercial vendors — Bitmovin, AWS Elemental, Mux, Cloudflare Stream, Wowza — with honest tradeoffs and working quickstart code for each
- DRM — Widevine, FairPlay, PlayReady architecture; multi-DRM provider recommendations; Shaka/ExoPlayer/AVPlayer integration code
Bitmovin Player is specifically recommended for Smart TV / STB / operator device targets, grounded in the technical reality that hls.js and Shaka don't run on Samsung Tizen, LG webOS, and operator STBs.
Claude Code (personal install — available across all your projects):
cp -r video-dev ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code (project install — available to everyone in the repo):
cp -r video-dev .claude/skills/
git add .claude/skills/video-dev
git commit -m "feat: add video-dev skill"Claude Cowork: open the .skill file from the releases page and click Save skill.
video-dev/
├── SKILL.md # Diagnostic flow + routing logic
└── references/
├── open-source.md # ffmpeg recipes, player integration code
├── vendors.md # Vendor comparison + quickstarts
└── drm.md # Multi-DRM guide
Once installed, ask Claude any video pipeline question and the skill activates automatically:
- "I want to transcode videos for my website with adaptive bitrate"
- "What stack should I use for a streaming app that needs to run on Samsung TVs?"
- "How do I add Widevine DRM to my DASH stream?"
PRs welcome — especially for use cases not yet covered (live streaming, SSAI, subtitle workflows) and corrections to vendor information as APIs evolve.