Lazycut: A simple terminal video trimmer using FFmpeg (github.com)
92 points by masterpos 7 hours ago
noiv 2 minutes ago
On MacOs I just press space and trim with finder. Even avoids re-compressing.
chris_va 3 minutes ago
Invoking ffmpeg, gzip and tar commands is a sort of reverse Turing test for LLMs
sorenjan 2 hours ago
I don't find trimming videos with ffmpeg particularly difficult, is just-ss xx -to xx -c copy basically. Sure, you need to get those time stamps using a media player, but you probably already have one so that isn't really an issue.
What I've found to be trickier is dividing a video into multiple clips, where one clip can start at the end of another, but not necessarily.
ramon156 2 hours ago
I don't find Sharing files with people very difficult, just login to your FTP and give an account to another user. - Person commenting on OneDrive
sorenjan 2 hours ago
Missed opportunity to reference the famous Dropbox hn comment.
I just think there are other closely related use cases where a separate program can add more value, especially in the terminal. I wouldn't suggest most people should use ffmpeg instead of a gui, those are too dissimilar. Another example is cutting out a part of a video, with ffmpeg you need to make two temporary videos and then concatenate them, that process would greatly benefit from a better ux.
gyan 15 minutes ago
tptacek 31 minutes ago
hiccuphippo an hour ago
I used a plugin in mpv to do it but I can't find it anymore. You just pressed a key to mark the start and end. And with . and , you could do it at keyframe resolution not just seconds.
tptacek 3 hours ago
This is very cool. I built one of these myself around Christmas; Claude Code can put one together in just a couple prompts (this is also how I worked out how to have Claude test TUIs with tmux). What was striking about my finished product --- which is much less slick than this --- was how much of the heavy lifting was just working out which arguments to pass to ffmpeg.
It's surprisingly handy to have something like this hanging around; I just use mine to fix up screen caps.
Commenting mostly because when I did this I thought I was doing something very silly, and I'm glad I'm not completely crazy.
Acrobatic_Road 6 minutes ago
Could have really used this a couple days ago. I had to record a video an assignment, but due to lack of global hotkeys on OBS with wayland, I had to start and stop the video on the OBS GUI. I tried to figure out ffmpeg but I was too tired and it was getting close to the deadline so I spent some time learning how to to do it with kdenlive.
ariym 5 hours ago
I think this is the first instance I've seen of an actual terminal video player. Very fun to play with.
mikkupikku 3 hours ago
mplayer, mpv and I think VLC can do it, with the right output driver settings (libcaca or a few other choices.)
tptacek 3 hours ago
You can just use ffmpeg to extract frames, and then just render the raw images with unicode blocks.
(There's Kitty Graphics too, but I couldn't figure out how to make terminal UI layout work with it.)
chadrs 2 hours ago
yeah I remember learning this trick in like 2007 with libaa and later caca for color.
It looks like this app is shelling out to ffmpeg to get the bitmap of a frame and then shelling to something called chafa to covert to nice terminal-friendly video.
mhuffman 2 hours ago
I have been using this one[0] and it is small, fast, and seems to work pretty great for me so far.
bfrjjrhfbf 2 hours ago
Having to separately download ffmpeg in the windows distribution does not really make sense
Just bundle it
ftchd 42 minutes ago
People that use GUIs/tools for things like ffmpeg, rclone etc really want the developer to autodetect if they have it already, and use that instead of installing a separate version/binary.
How do I know? I built one (https://github.com/rclone-ui/rclone-ui)
sorenjan 2 hours ago
I disagree, I don't want another ffmpeg binary, I already have one. Winget works well, especially since this is already a terminal program.
karlosvomacka 2 hours ago
afaik winget can automatically manage package dependencies.
faangguyindia 4 hours ago
I've been using ffmpeg with claude as video editor for long time.
hsuduebc2 2 hours ago
You mean you let create claude command or it itself runs ffmpeg on your local machine and returns you finished cut?
mandeepj 4 hours ago
I guess I can find another implementation to combine trimmed parts after taking out certain scenes?
hiccuphippo 3 hours ago
Write a text file with all the parts like this:
file 'file1.mp4'
file 'file2.mp4'
file 'file3.mp4'
ffmpeg -f concat -i files.txt -c copy output.mp4