I find my approach lightweight, but it’s still around 80 lines of code so a tad big to share as an HN comment. It also requires a bit of explanation to set up (though once done, it’s incredibly simple to use) and the output is custom to my needs.
Essentially, I already use mpv as my video player, which in addition to being very fast also allows seeking frame-by-frame, saving and returning to positions, and running Lua scripts. So I wrote some Lua which reacts to a specific key press by saving the current video timestamp. Press it again and it records a second timestamp, then it fires off Handbrake CLI (FFmpeg could also work) to do the cutting and save the trimmed file.
If you search online for “mpv cut video” you should find some plugins with that same idea. I have never used them so I can’t attest to how good or bad they are. All the ones I found are larger than my approach, but then again I just made mine do exactly what I want without customisation so that’s to be expected.
One specific advice I’ll give, if you go this approach and are on the Apple ecosystem: Use the Handbrake CLI instead of FFmpeg to do the cutting. FFmpeg was super frustrating and I was unable to get a result where the output video worked properly in Quick Look and sending through iMessage; after too long trying to get it to work and messing with a myriad flags, I switched to Handbrake with no weird settings and it’s been working flawlessly ever since.
Essentially, I already use mpv as my video player, which in addition to being very fast also allows seeking frame-by-frame, saving and returning to positions, and running Lua scripts. So I wrote some Lua which reacts to a specific key press by saving the current video timestamp. Press it again and it records a second timestamp, then it fires off Handbrake CLI (FFmpeg could also work) to do the cutting and save the trimmed file.
If you search online for “mpv cut video” you should find some plugins with that same idea. I have never used them so I can’t attest to how good or bad they are. All the ones I found are larger than my approach, but then again I just made mine do exactly what I want without customisation so that’s to be expected.
One specific advice I’ll give, if you go this approach and are on the Apple ecosystem: Use the Handbrake CLI instead of FFmpeg to do the cutting. FFmpeg was super frustrating and I was unable to get a result where the output video worked properly in Quick Look and sending through iMessage; after too long trying to get it to work and messing with a myriad flags, I switched to Handbrake with no weird settings and it’s been working flawlessly ever since.