Bug Report 🐛

npx create-video@latest fails during project creation in an environment where:

• npm is configured to use a corporate npm proxy / mirror (for example JFrog Artifactory)
• direct access to https://registry.npmjs.org is blocked or intercepted by the corporate network / proxy

The surprising part is that regular npm operations still work:

• npm view remotion version --json succeeds
• npm install for Remotion packages succeeds

So the failure seems specific to create-video, not to Remotion installation in general.

Reproduction

1. Configure npm to use a corporate registry / npm proxy in ~/.npmrc
2. Make sure direct access to https://registry.npmjs.org is blocked or rewritten by the network
3. Run:

npx create-video@latest

4. Choose Blank
5. Accept the default project name

Actual behavior

Project creation crashes with:

<anonymous_script>:1
<!-- ... -->
^

SyntaxError: Unexpected token '<', "<!-- ... " is not valid JSON
    at JSON.parse (<anonymous>)
    at getLatestRemotionVersion (.../node_modules/create-video/dist/latest-remotion-version.js:29:17)

In my case, the response body appears to be HTML / proxy output instead of npm metadata JSON.

Expected behavior

create-video should work in environments where npm itself is configured correctly to use a registry mirror/proxy.

At minimum, it should:

• respect npm registry configuration instead of hardcoding registry.npmjs.org, or
• fail with a clearer error message if the latest version lookup cannot return valid JSON

Why I think this is a bug in create-video

The current source appears to hardcode the public npm registry:

packages/create-video/src/latest-remotion-version.ts

const req = http.get(
  'https://registry.npmjs.org/remotion',
  {
    headers: {
      accept:
        'application/vnd.npm.install-v1+json; q=1.0, application/json; q=0.8, */*',
    },
  },
  ...
);

That means create-video bypasses:

• npm config get registry
• NPM_CONFIG_REGISTRY
• corporate npm mirrors / proxies

So even when npm view remotion version works, create-video can still fail.

Additional validation

In the same environment:

npm view remotion version --json
npm view @remotion/cli version --json

both succeed, and a plain npm install for Remotion dependencies succeeds as well.

This suggests the issue is the direct HTTP call in create-video, not the package availability.

Suggested fixes

Any of these would help:

1. Resolve the latest version via npm config / npm registry instead of hardcoding https://registry.npmjs.org
2. Allow a CLI flag or env var to override the Remotion version lookup source
3. Gracefully handle non-JSON responses and print a useful error message such as:

Failed to fetch the latest Remotion version from the registry.
Your network may block direct access to registry.npmjs.org.
Please configure a reachable registry or pass an explicit version.

4. Optionally allow passing an explicit Remotion version so project scaffolding can continue offline / behind restricted networks

Environment

• macOS
• Node.js: v22.19.0
• npm: 10.9.3
• create-video: latest at the time of testing
• Network: corporate environment with proxy / traffic inspection and an npm registry mirror

Workaround

As a workaround, I can clone the template repo directly and then run npm install, which works:

git clone https://github.com/remotion-dev/template-empty.git my-video
cd my-video
npm install

So this looks fixable in create-video specifically.