Lossless Video Trimming with FFmpeg

[@artihlec]

thx for the -codec copy tip. I was too lazy to read through man pages of ffmpeg to figure out that omitting the codec attribute leads to actually encoding the trimmed video by default.

[@samspade7522]

Do you mind if I make a copy of this only for my use? I saw BigBoy on its first run after rebuild but was unable to get any viewable video. Yours is great. BTW thanks for your tutorials; I have learned a lot from viewing them.

[@birisi585]

if you enter the code without "-codec copy" trimming process taking longer but the output video is less likely to be buggy. I encountered some bugs with "-codec copy" and deleting these, did the trick.

[@Rickmakes]

If you don't use "-codec copy" it is re-encoding the video which can lower the quality. That is certainly an acceptable way to do it but I wanted to focus on the lossless technique for this video.

[@fetB]

incredible stuff

[@FringeWizard2]

Most of the time this works but I have this one clip that is 20:48 long and I try to copy from 0:00 to 20:30 and the resulting video is blank/black for the first 25 seconds though audio plays through it. I think I need to re-encode.

[@Ryan-rn7ck]

Re-encode using the following: ffmpeg -i out.mp4 -ss 00:01:03.0000 -to 00:01:13.0000 -c:v libx264 -c:a copy out2.mp4 You will want to _not_ copy the codec otherwise, it can not on something that isn't a keyframe and cause black frames in the beginning of the video. This command will re-encode, which may or may not satisfy your use-case, but the trim will be more accurate.

[@BeccaVinesz]

I don't have ffplay, how to install that?

[@jumanjiwarlord]

When installing ffmpeg from Homebrew - ffplay automatically gets installed. *If you're not familiar with Homebrew, you might want to familiarize yourself with that. Once Homebrew is running, it's as easy as: "brew install ffmpeg" But, Homebrew itself as a concept takes some getting used to....

[@BeccaVinesz]

@@jumanjiwarlord Oh I see, thanks for the answer, I'll try to get into it

[@MultiReadify]

Amazing, but how can we do this on Windows?

[@GNU_Linux_for_good]

come on over - use _free software [GNU/Linux]_

[@ddtrilive9554]

thanks for sharing knowledge

[@kiqyou]

is that grand fucking junction?

[@Rickmakes]

Yep. From there?

[@kiqyou]

@@Rickmakes no but i've been through that crossing enough times to recognize it while randomly searching for ffmpeg stuff.