B-ROLL Blog: Releases and Behind the Scenes

What is new in B-ROLL?

B-ROLL’s first public release went up on GitHub on July 30, 2026, as a free app for 64-bit Windows 10 and 11. Release posts on the blog tell the story of each public release: what it added, why, and what an editor gains from it.

The first public release of B-ROLL records what that build shipped: videos, clips, playlists and channels (channel downloads are switched on in Advanced options), conversion to ProRes or DNxHR, audio, subtitles and credit files. Exact version numbers and dates live in the B-ROLL changelog, and the download page carries the current file sizes and checksums. Blog posts explain the reasons behind a change, and the changelog lists the change itself.

Each kind of question has its own place on the site:

Your question	Where to look
What did B-ROLL ship, and why?	Release posts on the blog
Which version is current, and what changed in it?	The changelog
How does a feature decide what it does?	Behind-the-scenes posts on the blog
How do I use a feature step by step?	Guides: YouTube footage from download to timeline
What can B-ROLL do today?	B-ROLL features for video editors

How do B-ROLL’s features work inside?

Behind-the-scenes posts explain the rules inside B-ROLL’s code in plain words, with worked examples. The first one covers how B-ROLL picks a ProRes or DNxHR tier for each video instead of always using the heaviest one.

The tier rule scales each tier’s reference data rate to the clip’s resolution and frame rate, then compares it with the source bitrate. B-ROLL chooses the lightest tier whose scaled rate is at least 10 times the source bitrate, the factor B-ROLL’s code treats as enough for an intra-frame copy to look the same as the stream. When no tier reaches 10 times, B-ROLL uses HQ, and DNxHR HQX is reserved for 10-bit sources.

The worked examples are in how B-ROLL picks a ProRes or DNxHR tier automatically, and the codecs themselves are explained in codecs and formats for editing YouTube footage.

The rule exists because of a real timeline problem. On Ema Zamboni’s edits in DaVinci Resolve Studio on Windows 11, 4K60 AV1 footage from YouTube was heavy to play back, and AV1 or VP9 downloads crashed Resolve at times. Automatic conversion to ProRes and DNxHR was built to solve that, and the tier rule keeps those files from growing larger than they need to be.

How is B-ROLL built?

B-ROLL is built by Ema Zamboni, a video editor who cuts YouTube videos in DaVinci Resolve Studio on Windows 11, with Claude, an AI assistant, as coding help. Ema made the app to collect b-roll for those edits.

The About dialog puts it in Ema’s own words: “I needed this app, so I made it with Claude since I’m not a developer. I tried to polish it and make it work as smooth as possible, but it may not be perfect.” The account of how that split of work runs day to day is in building a YouTube downloader with Claude as coding help.

The toolchain underneath is yt-dlp, ffmpeg and Deno, all open-source projects that the app downloads from their GitHub release pages on first launch. The app’s own source code is not published. B-ROLL runs on Windows 10 and 11 today, and macOS and Linux versions are planned.

New posts appear only when something real happens: a release, a fix worth explaining, or a design decision an editor can use.