Desktop release build

VideoCaptioner publishes desktop bundles for Windows and macOS from GitHub Actions. Users can download the zip files from a GitHub Release, extract them, and run the bundled VideoCaptioner executable without installing Python or FFmpeg.

Local build

uv sync --frozen
uv run --with pyinstaller --with static-ffmpeg python scripts/build_desktop.py --clean
uv run python scripts/smoke_desktop.py dist/VideoCaptioner

The build script downloads static ffmpeg and ffprobe for the current platform and bundles them under resource/bin inside the PyInstaller app. Runtime user data is kept in the system user-data directory, so app upgrades do not overwrite settings, logs, cache, models, or custom subtitle styles.

CI and releases

.github/workflows/build-desktop.yml builds on:

• windows-latest
• macos-13

Each job runs a real packaged-app smoke test:

• starts the packaged executable with --version
• lists bundled subtitle styles
• runs doctor --json
• generates a short video with bundled FFmpeg
• creates both soft-subtitle and hard-subtitle videos
• validates output duration with bundled ffprobe

On v* tags, desktop zip files are uploaded to the GitHub Release. The PyPI workflow still publishes the Python package and uploads the wheel/sdist to the same release.