How to Generate Videos Locally with Wan 2.5 Open Weights
Wan 2.5 is Alibaba’s openly licensed video generation model that outputs 1080p clips at 24fps with synchronized audio, and you can download the weights and run it on your own GPU.
Tongyi Lab’s Wan family is one of the few video model lines where the weights are genuinely open and commercially usable. Version 2.5 is the one that added sound, which changes what you can do without a separate audio pass. The catch is hardware. A small model with quantization fits on one 24GB card; the big ones want a multi-GPU rig.
How much VRAM does Wan 2.5 need?
| Setup | VRAM | Realistic result |
|---|---|---|
| Small model, quantized | 24GB | Short 720p clips, slow |
| Small model, fp16 | 48GB | 1080p, 5s clips |
| Large model | Multi-GPU (2x80GB) | 1080p, longer and more coherent |
If you have a single 4090 or 3090, expect to spend time on quantization and offloading. It works, but a 5-second 1080p clip can take several minutes.
How do you install Wan 2.5 in ComfyUI?
Grab the ComfyUI-Wan wrapper, drop the model weights into models/diffusion_models, and put the VAE and audio encoder in their folders. Then load a text-to-video workflow and point it at the checkpoint. Weights are on Hugging Face; the fp16 set for the small model is roughly 30 GB, so clear disk space first. ComfyUI is the practical path because the built-in node presets already handle the audio sync branch.
Can you use Wan 2.5 through an API instead?
Yes. Alibaba Cloud hosts Wan 2.5 as a paid API, and the official demo site gives a limited free quota you can burn through in an afternoon of testing. For occasional use the API is far cheaper than buying a GPU. For batch generation of hundreds of clips, on-premise wins because there are no per-clip fees.
What does the audio sync actually do?
It generates a soundtrack alongside the picture rather than dubbing after the fact. In my tests, ambient and percussive sounds line up well; spoken dialogue is hit or miss and still needs a real voice pipeline. Treat the audio as a solid scratch track, not a finished mix.
Who should use local Wan 2.5?
- Studios with footage that cannot leave the building.
- Teams generating hundreds of B-roll clips where per-clip API fees add up.
- Researchers who want to fine-tune on proprietary footage.
- Anyone building product demos from a single reference image.
Skip it if you need fast turnaround on a laptop, or if you only make a handful of clips a month. In those cases the hosted API is the sane choice.
Key Takeaways
- Wan 2.5 ships open weights with a permissive commercial license.
- Output is 1080p at 24fps with synchronized audio.
- A quantized small model runs on a single 24GB GPU.
- No per-clip fees once you own the hardware; setup effort is the real cost.
