About snip.ninja
A small fan project for grabbing the exact five seconds of a movie you want to send to a friend.
The 2016 version
The first cut of snip.ninja went up in 2016. We launched on Product Hunt, collected a few hundred upvotes, watched our friends paste links into group chats for a couple of weeks, then went back to our day jobs. The domain stayed registered. The code rotted. Every once in a while one of us would type the URL, see the broken page, sigh, close the tab.
The original idea was simple and we couldn’t quite let it go. If you wanted to send someone the “you can’t handle the truth” scene from A Few Good Men, your options in 2016 were: hunt for a YouTube upload that hadn’t been pulled, hope it was the right cut, paste the link, and then wait for it to load with the wrong thumbnail and an unskippable ad. None of that was the vibe of the moment. The whole point of quoting a movie at someone is timing.
Coming back to it in 2026
We rebuilt the whole thing from scratch this spring on a modern stack. Faster, more stable, and a lot more fun to figure out. The clipper is frame-accurate, search runs across every line of dialogue in the catalog, and clips render to a real MP4 you can send anywhere: iMessage, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, a tweet, an email to your dad who still doesn’t trust links.
We’re adding movies slowly. The catalog will probably never be huge. That’s on purpose. We’d rather have 50 films where every line of dialogue is clipped clean than 5,000 with broken timing and missing posters.
Fair use, copyright, and the lawyer paragraph
snip.ninja is an independent fan project. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to any studio, streaming service, production company, distributor, or rights holder. Movie posters are sourced from Wikipedia and shown alongside encyclopedic metadata for identification. Short clips are generated on demand for personal commentary, criticism, reference, and conversation among friends.
We rely in good faith on the doctrine of fair use as codified in 17 U.S.C. § 107. The clips are short, serve a different purpose than the original (they exist to be quoted, not consumed in place of the film), and have no plausible effect on the market for the underlying work. Nobody is canceling their streaming subscription because they can grab ten seconds of The Hangover for a group chat. If anything, a good clip sends people back to the movie.
That said: we know fair use is a defense, not a permission slip. If you hold rights to a film in our catalog and you’d rather not have it here, email [email protected] with the title and we’ll pull it. No drama, no lawyers, no “please send a formal DMCA letter from your IP firm” runaround. We respond fast. We honor the request.
Formal DMCA takedown
procedures and our designated agent contact live on our
DMCA Notice & Takedown page (we are a
registered service provider with the U.S. Copyright Office, registration
number DMCA-1071954). Service-of-use rules and the rest of
the legal stuff live in our
Terms of Use.