The project started in August 2008 by Jonathan Thomas, with the objective of providing a stable, free, and friendly to use video editor.

[1][4][5][6][7][8] The program supports Windows, macOS, and Linux ever since version 2.1.0 (released in 2016).

[12] OpenShot's core video editing functionality is implemented in a C++ library, libopenshot.

The core audio editing is based on the JUCE library.

OpenShot supports commonly used video compression formats that are supported by FFmpeg, including WebM (VP9), AVCHD (libx264), HEVC (libx265), and audio codecs such as mp3 (libmp3lame) and aac (libfaac).