The gist

LongCat-Video is a 13.6-billion-parameter foundational video generation model from the Meituan LongCat Team. It is designed to create high-quality, minutes-long videos from text, images, or by continuing existing video clips. The model unifies these generation tasks into a single framework and also includes specialized versions for creating audio-driven avatar animations.

What it does

Generate video from text prompts, images, or by continuing existing video clips.
Produce minutes-long videos without color drifting or quality degradation.
Animate human avatars driven by single or multi-stream audio inputs.
Generalize avatar generation to stylized domains like anime and animals.
Achieve efficient inference using a coarse-to-fine generation strategy and Block Sparse Attention.

How it works

LongCat-Video is an open-source model that runs locally from the command line. Users provide text prompts, images, or audio files as input to Python scripts to generate new video files. It employs a coarse-to-fine generation strategy for efficient inference, particularly for high-resolution output. The model weights are available on Hugging Face and are released under the MIT License.

Best for

This tool is best for developers and AI researchers who need a powerful, open-source framework for programmatic video generation, including creating long-form content or audio-driven character animations.

Watch out for

Requires technical expertise to install and run, including managing Python environments, CUDA versions, and command-line scripts. Significant local compute resources, likely one or more powerful GPUs, are necessary for inference.