Troubleshooting

Every message below is printed to stderr. After you fix the cause, rerun the same command. Finished stages and judge answers replay from the cache.

Exit 3: cold open: no supermajority or outro: no supermajority. The judge’s five votes did not reach four identical answers. The message lists the votes and the flag that answers the question. Read the candidates in the message, then rerun with a time in seconds, for example --cold-open 42 or --outro 310. The answer is saved to decisions.json in the run directory, and the question is not asked again for that run directory. To change a saved answer, edit decisions.json in the run directory.

Exit 4: JUDGE UNAVAILABLE: judge command not found: <name>. The judge command is not on PATH. Install it, or fix TALKINGHEAD_JUDGE.

Exit 4: JUDGE UNAVAILABLE with a sign-in or usage message. For omp, run omp login. For Claude Code, sign in with claude. A usage limit still standing after five backoffs (about 31 minutes) ends the run with this exit code. The run never switches to another model by itself, so wait for the limit to reset and rerun.

video track ... vs audio track ... differ by ... Fix the master or pass --allow-av-mismatch. The video and audio streams of the source differ in length by more than 1 second. This often happens when a file was muxed with -shortest. Export the master with matching track lengths, or pass --allow-av-mismatch if you accept the drift.

alignment is untrustworthy: match confidence ... below the ... this config requires. --audio did not line up with the video clearly enough to cut against. Check the sync on a known event in both files. If it is right, pass --allow-bad-align.

missing tool(s): .... The message names each missing tool and its install command. For visuals, rsvg-convert is needed (brew install librsvg, or apt install librsvg2-bin), and on macOS swiftc too (xcode-select --install). Pass --no-visuals to skip them.

fluidaudiocli not found. Put fluidaudiocli on PATH or set FLUIDAUDIO_BIN, or use --transcriber whisper. Parakeet runs on macOS only.

OPENROUTER_API_KEY is not set. Set it, or use --transcriber parakeet or --transcriber whisper.

OpenRouter Scribe request failed: HTTP 401. The key was rejected. The run stops with this message and tries nothing else.

RunDirConflict (... is the cook directory for ...). A run directory belongs to one recording. Pass --out-dir with a new directory for the other recording.

verification failed: ... (exit 1). A fatal check failed. The run writes report.md with status FAILED and exits 1, and the overlay pass does not run. final.mp4 is still written, but it failed a check, so do not publish it. Read the failing line in the verification table of report.md and fix its cause, which is usually the source or the alignment.

silero-vad unavailable; .... Informational. Run uv sync --extra vad if you want the mouth-noise pass gated by Silero VAD.