Playhead

Playhead is a video-analysis service for AI agents, delivered as a hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. Language models cannot open a video file, so they answer from a title or transcript instead. Playhead turns any TikTok, YouTube, X or local clip into contact sheets — grids of frames with the timestamp burned into every frame — plus a transcript, so an agent's answer is anchored to a specific second rather than a guess.

Everything runs server-side: downloading, frame extraction and transcription happen on Playhead's machines, so it works in web and mobile clients where a local script cannot. It offers six detail levels, from an overview at 0.5–2 fps across a whole hour down to 30 fps where two frames sit 33 ms apart — the level that makes easing, bounce and dropped frames visible as difference rather than description.

It connects to the agent you already use — one click for Claude, Cursor, VS Code and LM Studio, one line for Claude Code and Codex — and you sign in with your account instead of pasting a key. Your own files work too: pass a local path and the file is uploaded once and reused for every later call.