Changelog.
What changed in each version.

010.0 — first release

Channelsmith is a self-hosted, white-label studio for documentary and explainer videos for YouTube channels.

Channels and episodes

• Channels set up once: niche, audience, language, tone, narrator, style pack, target length, channel bible, topics to avoid, sign-off, posting schedule, brand kit, YouTube channel, music mood.
• Idea Lab: video ideas with three title variants, hook, angle and reason; approve, reorder, discard.
• Episodes in nine steps, each visible, editable, re-runnable, priced before it runs and refunded when it fails: research, script, fact check, visuals, footage, render, package, Shorts, publish.
• Research dossier where every fact is tied to a source the AI actually retrieved with web search.
• Outline built for retention and a spoken narration script by chapter; every paragraph names its facts.
• Fact check of every claim (supported, unsupported, contradicted, opinion); flagged claims must be fixed, edited or kept as is by a named person before visuals and render run.
• Storyboards written per chapter, so 10 to 20 minute episodes stay reliable.
• Language versions: a finished episode remade in another language as its own episode, on the same or another channel.
• Episodes page across all channels, a stage board, a content calendar and channel statistics.
• Autopilot (off by default) that prepares the next approved idea for a free slot and always stops at review.
• Client review links with comments pinned to moments of the video.

Visuals and sound

• 24 scene types: footage with Ken Burns, lower thirds and headlines; country, route, pin and region maps drawn from Natural Earth; newspaper and document scenes with highlighted lines; top-N rankings; profile and quote cards; charts, statistics, timelines, comparisons, chapter cards, title and end cards.
• Ten style packs with their own type, colour, motion, film grain, vignette, letterbox, captions and music mood: documentary, explainer, true crime, history, finance, science, nature, technology, biography, places.
• 16:9 for episodes and 9:16 for Shorts; 1080p, 4K on plans that allow it.
• Licensed footage only: Pexels, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons (public domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA) and the workspace's own uploads, ranked against each scene's query, with the licence and credit of every file kept.
• Long renders resume: finished parts are kept and a hung frame is retried.
• Narration with ElevenLabs and captions timed to the spoken words; pronunciation rules per brand kit.
• Optional built-in local voice (English, Kokoro-82M) that runs on the server's CPU without a key; an add-on the operator installs (npm run voice:local).
• Music from the operator's library, picked by mood unless someone picks a track.
• Scene editor: rundown by chapter with timecodes, live monitor with safe areas, timeline coloured by scene kind, forms for every scene, chat edits, rewrite one field, translate, versions with restore.

Packaging and publishing

• Three titles, description with chapters (YouTube's rules), sources and footage credits within YouTube's 5,000-byte limit (credits that do not fit are offered for the pinned comment), tags, hashtags, pinned comment, category, and thumbnail designs rendered at 1280×720.
• Shorts picked from the long video and laid out in 9:16.
• Originality report against YouTube's inauthentic-content policy before publishing.
• YouTube publishing with the operator's own Google OAuth client: resumable upload, thumbnail, captions, playlist, schedule, made-for-kids flag and the altered or synthetic content disclosure. Always approved by a person.

For the operator

• Operator console (MIKODES Admin Kit): brand, AI models, voice engine, style packs and languages, research limits, footage sources, publishing, credit prices per step, plans and credit packs with Stripe, render settings, music library, channels and episodes of every workspace with failed steps, system health, revenue, team, audit.
• Workspaces with owner, editor, client and viewer roles, brand kits, usage by kind of work.
• REST API for channels, episodes, storyboards and renders (publishing excluded), signed webhooks for episode steps, uploads, storyboards and renders, and an MCP server for AI assistants.
• Backups, restore and safe updates; Docker image; offline guide in docs/guide.