I just discovered this post, and I'm really happy to see a lot of satisfied long time users as well as excited new users who recently discovered this.<p>I think the most common criticism is that the app is large and uses a lot of memory (compared to Notepad?:P) due to it being Electron based. Somewhat unpopular opinion, but here goes: Developing an app using Electron gives such tremendous benefits that it far outweighs any downsides. It lets you easily build a cross-OS app on a super optimised, stable and secure platform that's being battle tested by billions of people around the world every day (Chromium). It gives you all the features of the web, and it "just works" on almost any popular OS. The web has all the big tech pushing new features and improvements all the time and it maintains really good backwards compatibility. I don't think I ever had the LosslessCut app actually crash on me. CI, automatic building and releasing to all different kinds of channels is a breeze due to tools like `electron-builder`.<p>I think if you compare it to most other lossy video editors, you'll find that the CPU usage is much lower (especially per minute of produced video!), and the memory footprint is probably lower than many other popular video editors. Storage is cheap, and what is 500mb when working with 4K video anyways, so optimising for size is mostly a waste of time and doesn't really benefit 99% of users. Counter arguments are welcome :)<p>-Mikael
Author of LosslessCut
Used this for ages. People will bring up various alternatives (including just strictly using FFmpeg) and I have to wonder if the only use case they can fathom is clipping 1 segment out of a longer video. All suggested alternatives would involve such a garbage workflow and unintuitive experience for any real project. I dislike Electron as much as anyone else but it works fine here, and does the job better than anything else I've tried. I am very comfortable with FFmpeg and have used pretty much any tool you can name, I still use Losslesscut daily.
Been using this for years, it's a very good and simple tool. There's a surprising amount of garbage in this space. SEO spam infects any searches you do for video editing software. Many "cut" tools actually just fiddle some start media timestamp in the file so the output file isn't smaller, just a video player will start at the right timestamp. Ie: not an actual cut. This one does the job.<p>It's implemented in Javascript with Chromium and the HTML5 video player. Not the way I would have thought to do it but makes cross platform a lot easier. You can do the same with ffmpeg on the command line of course but having a GUI to pick the cut points makes all the difference.
LosslessCut is a lifesaver for cutting segments out of my usually-unedited podcast[1].<p>The workflow to do a minor edit in a full editor like Final Cut Pro looks roughly like:<p>- open Final Cut Pro<p>- create a new proj... oh shoot no, a new library? Yeah that's right.<p>- click import and track down the videos on my hard drive<p>- <i>now</i> create a new project and drag the videos into the timeline<p>- use the blade tool to cut out a segment<p>- export the video which is... uh... oh yes under the share menu bar and then the format needs to be... hmmm... I think export for YouTube<p>- wait approximately `videoLength/5` for the video to export<p>- oh my goodness my hard drive somehow has `videoSize*4` less space<p>In LosslessCut that workflow looks like:<p>- open LosslessCut[2]<p>- drag and drop your videos in<p>- mark the start and end times of either the segments you want to keep or the ones you want to take out<p>- hit export and... wow, it's already done? How is that possible?! And it's just in the same format as my source video! Perfect. Oh man and it even saved a little xml file so if I happen to open the same file again I haven't lost my human work of marking the in and out points.<p>The cuts are usually slightly off from where I'd ideally like them to be, I think because LosslessCut can only cut on i-frames[3], but it's a totally fair tradeoff for my use case.<p>I liked the minimalist editor interface so much I copied the timeline part of it for a dedicated social media video clipper I'm working on[4].<p>If you'd like to try it out I strongly suggest installing it from GitHub and donating the amount you would've spent in the macOS app store. The macOS app store version has fewer disk permissions and adds an extra step asking for access to each folder you want to edit in.<p>1. makers.dev<p>2. frustratingly, right clicking a video and selecting "open in LosslessCut" doesn't work<p>3. i-frames in most video codecs are "key frames" that repaint the entire frame. Most frames are p-frames or "predicted frames" which just store a delta from the last frame.<p>4. thevideoclipper.com
> This app is not for exact cutting. Start cut time will be "rounded" to the nearest previous keyframe, which may be a fraction of a second before your desired cut point, or up to several seconds, depending on the encoding.<p>I found this problem with all ffmpeg-based editors...does anybody know of an editor capable of cutting between inter-frames? The same happens with sound files, which is inconvenient.
LosslessCut is a magnificent tool.
I use it as the final step for my lecture recordings, which have been disassembled with ffmpeg, edited with Audacity, encoded with Handbrake, and finally reassembled using ffmpeg. LosslessCut combines the speed of ffmpeg with a quick and pleasingly minimal UI.
I think avidemux does the same thing.<p><a href="https://avidemux.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">https://avidemux.sourceforge.net/</a>
LosslessCut is great, but I needed something quick when I cleaned up old GoPro videos. Just open an mp4/mov in QuickTime Player, trim it and save under a new name. It will create a lossless cut. If you need several from same video, you would need to repeat the process on the original file.<p>(unfortunately, the trimmed video won't get the same metadata, so I also needed to use exiftool -TagsFromFile oldvid.mp4 -all:all newvid.mp4 )
Virtualdub downloads as a 1.81 MB zip file.<p>This downloads as an 84.9 MB zip file.<p>I sure hope this does something Virtualdub can't / anything better than Virtualdub, my current preferred lossless video / audio editing Swiss army knife.<p>Can anyone confirm whether that is the case?<p>BTW downloads that don't require approaching Lord Appstore cap in hand can be found here:<p><a href="https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/releases" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/releases</a>
LosslessCut looks awesome! I also created a lossless video trimming tool a couple of months ago: <a href="https://videotrim.app" rel="nofollow">https://videotrim.app</a>
LosslessCut seems to be more featureful but mine works in the browser without having to install it. It also has the same limitations since cutting times are rounded to the closest keyframes, but this way there's no need to re-encode anything.
Related:<p><i>Lossless-cut: The swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24883030" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24883030</a> - Oct 2020 (10 comments)<p><i>LosslessCut – Save space by quickly and losslessly trimming video files</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22026412" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22026412</a> - Jan 2020 (1 comment)<p><i>Show HN: LosslessCut – Cross-platform GUI tool for fast, lossless video cutting</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885585" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12885585</a> - Nov 2016 (33 comments)
If you'd prefer something command-line-based, I'd recommend mkvmerge: <a href="https://mkvtoolnix.download/" rel="nofollow">https://mkvtoolnix.download/</a><p>FFmpeg also works of course (it's what LosslessCut uses internally), but in my experience I've occasionally run into files where FFMpeg doesn't properly cut on keyframes and I end up with a few seconds of no image at the start of the video. No such problems with mkvmerge, and the API is much simpler.
Never realised the site was so bad... It's a fantastic tool, but it'd be nice if the site opened with why you'd want to use it, and what it can do, rather than jumping straight into user testimonials from people who mean nothing to you, followed by a complete nonsense "them vs us" image set. In what universe does a reencode-on-save using any of the dozens of normal tools that people use turn a normal video file into a 7 bit palette gif?
LosslessCut works great if the keyframes of the video are not too far apart and if you already know where you want to cut. I posted something similar (a web app for automatic silence removal) a few months ago in Show HN: <a href="https://www.savvycut.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.savvycut.com</a>.<p>We also use keyframe based cutting for lossless cuts and a smart-cut mode that only re-encodes parts around keyframes (at least for h264 and vp8 codecs). I see that you also experiment with a similar smart-cut feature: <a href="https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/issues/126</a>.
That seems to work quite well if you re-encode with the same parameters as the original but I guess there are a lot of edge cases.
It's rare that I come across software with such thoughtfully designed UI and great UX where everything just works™, including things you didn't know you needed. I felt like I immediately knew where everything was (even without toggling the simplified mode). I use LosslessCut from time to time to make small looping videos for my blog, and after my first use I immediately went to donate to the developer. I remember even writing some detailed paragraphs about why it's so good in the PayPal message, but something went wrong and PayPal lost it, so it was a silent donation in the end. Definitely in my global top 5.
HN saves the day again. This is exactly what I needed to edit some videos on a deadline today. Thanks for posting it! I usually use ffmpeg from command line to trim a video but needed to do some more complex edits that LosslessCut makes easy.
For lossless audio only editing, and a very polished experience, check out<p><a href="https://www.rogueamoeba.com/fission/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rogueamoeba.com/fission/</a>
If lossless, why doesn't LosslessCut export the original media codec and wrapper? Seems to have its own unique file format.<p>What I want is a 64-bit version of Quicktime 7 Pro. Q7P has interface issues (handles are too small, and it is clumsy to get to specific time index), but otherwise it is a Swiss Army Knife of clipping. Apple's 64-bit Quicktime X is absolutely worthless (I don't want to re-encode, and I don't want to <i>share</i> anything!).
Protip: for simple lossless cutting, ffmpeg is more than enough. To make a 2 second clip starting from the third second of input file:<p>ffmpeg -ss 3 -t 2 -i in.mkv -c copy out.mkv<p>[edited to put -ss and -t before -i]
Been using this for a while to cut down gameplay footage I want to share with friends. It works well but I wish they implemented a simple way to combine multiple audio streams into one stream for upload to youtube/elsewhere.<p>From what I can tell, FFMPEG does support actions like that. Perhaps it's not "lossless enough" for the app author.
This looks nice. I've been cutting all the videos I make for my skateboarding "wordle" site by using ffmpeg and its scene detection.<p>Some times the scene detection isn't perfect and I have to shave off a few milliseconds to get the clip just right. Also scene detection doesn't do well with fade transitions or with night time skate clips where there's a camera with a flash.<p>I also learned how to put clips back together with ffmpeg too. I've definitely been doing this the hard way, but it's been fun learning ffmpeg and its crazy incantations.<p>Here's my site: <a href="https://skateboardle.com" rel="nofollow">https://skateboardle.com</a>
Nice interface, simple and beautiful.<p>For casual video audio editing, I usually use Avidemux. Its Copy mode is similar in cutting out portions of the video without the lengthy re-encoding process. LosslessCut looks nice. I’ll give it a try.
This project has been my go-to example of the absurdity of Electron since its inception. This is a thin wrapper around ffmpeg, which does all of the real work here and is a much more powerful and versatile tool. Why does this ship an entire web browser? Why does this even exist? The world may never know.
I'll keep an eye on this. I have a very technically interesting project soon which will require quite a lot of cuts; my thought was just "re-encode everything as I-frames" (all of the source material consists of clips under four minutes long). This might help.
Just tried this on a screen recording I made, really simple way to cut out boring bits e.g loading/waiting times, mousing etc. Great, I'll use this again!
I've a semi-related question. What's your workflow for matching torrented videos with subtitles that have been provided in the same torrent? Often the directory structure is<p><pre><code> Some.video.mkv
Subtitles/Some.video/English.0.srt
</code></pre>
and my players of choice (mpv and MPC) are unable to automatically make the match.