NearVid is built and run by a single independent developer, as part of Near — a small family of privacy-first browser tools. It exists out of a simple objection: for most everyday file jobs, the standard design of “upload your file to our server and trust us” is backwards. A modern browser on your own device is perfectly capable of doing the work itself — so that is exactly what NearVid has it do.
Trim video losslessly (a stream copy — no re-encoding, no quality loss), convert clips to WebM or GIF, extract the audio track or a single frame, and export MP4 on browsers that ship their own H.264 encoder via WebCodecs. The engine is a real FFmpeg build compiled to WebAssembly, running inside your browser tab.
There is no account, no sign-up and no file storage, because there is no server that could receive your video in the first place: the site is completely static. Its Content-Security-Policy technically blocks video data from being sent anywhere — a guarantee you can check yourself in your browser’s developer tools, not a policy you have to take on trust.
Because your device does the processing, serving NearVid costs almost nothing per use — there is no conversion-server bill to pass on to you. The site is funded by ads on the landing and blog pages, shown only after you consent, and by clearly labelled affiliate links. The processing workspace itself shows no ads at all: it runs in a cross-origin-isolated mode (required by the multi-threaded engine) in which third-party ad frames technically cannot load — so the screen your video is actually on is ad-free by construction.
NearVid is one of six Near tools built on the same principle — your files stay near you: NearPDF (PDF pages), NearIMG (image compress/resize/convert), NearBG (background removal), NearScrub (metadata removal), NearSeal (file encryption) — and NearVid for video.
Questions, bug reports or ideas: contact@nearvid.com, or see the contact page.