🔥VideoPlayback

VideoPlayback reverses a video. The whole clip plays backwards - water flowing up, people walking in reverse, the works - and it can reverse the audio with it, which is the twist that makes this actually useful rather than a party trick. Reversed footage is a genuine editing staple: it's how you get "the water is reabsorbing into the sea" shots, how you loop an action cleanly (play forward, play back, loop), and it's a favorite trick for extending short AI clips into longer, seamless loops. AnimateDiff and Wan clips are short; reversing and re-concatenating is one of the cheap ways to double them.

How it works

A single FFmpeg call: -vf reverse for the video, plus -af areverse when reverse_audio is True. The reverse filter is a frame-buffer operation, so it needs to hold the whole clip in memory or use temp files - long videos will take a moment and use some disk space, but for clip-length AI footage it's instant. Output is written to your output_path with a timestamped name.

The inputs that matter

Three fields, two of them you'll actually set:

• video_path - the clip to reverse.
• reverse_audio - True or False, default True. This is where people get surprised: reversed audio isn't "backwards music," it's the literal reversed waveform - dialogue becomes garbled moan-speak. For footage loops you usually want False (or a fresh soundtrack via AddAudio). Keep True only when the reversed audio is the point, or when it's ambience you don't care about.
• output_path - the pre-existing directory for the result.

Outputs

One video_complete_path string. No preview, no frame info - go find the file.

Install

Pack-wide story, again: the real dependency is FFmpeg on PATH (requirements.txt is one line - pathlib). ComfyUI Manager, search "ComfyUI-FFmpeg", or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/MoonHugo/ComfyUI-FFmpeg
cd ComfyUI-FFmpeg
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart ComfyUI.

Gotchas

• This is a full re-encode - the reverse filter can't stream-copy. For very long videos it's slower and produces a fresh encode rather than a copy of the original stream.
• If you flip the audio and it sounds like a demon speaking in tongues, that's correct behavior, not a bug. It's literally your audio playing backwards.
• Reversing + re-concatenating to loop: note this node gives you one reversed file - chaining it with MergingVideoByTwo (original + reversed) is how you build the seamless forward-back loop, but the junction won't be a perfect frame match unless your clip's first and last frames already line up.