GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 666963
Crop the end of videos without re-encoding
Last modified: 2011-12-30 16:29:42 UTC
I have several hundred high definition mp4 files (TED talks) that all have a 3-4minute long commercial at the end. I would like to crop the commercial from all of the lectures, which would save me about 10-15GB of space. Performing this task with pitivi is currently hopeless, since it cannot simply crop the end of the a video (mp4 at least). Instead, it re-encodes the part that remains, which takes at least an hour per lecture, and the quality is abated. A quick search revealed that several proprietary applications allow cropping of videos without reencoding them. I did not find any linux tool that does that however. Re-encoding/rendering should only be necessary if the user cuts a part from the middle of the video. However, if one wants to crop the end, there is no need for reencoding.
This is not an easy problem to solve, and it would need to be handled by GStreamer/GES first as far as I know. Avidemux, mencoder and ffmpeg (or perhaps gst-launch) are pretty much the only tools I know of on Linux that could currently handle this lossless trimming scenario.
We do have a TIMELINE_MODE_SMART_RENDER in GES that, will not reencode, neither audio nor video in the case were the expected ouput is in the exact same format as the input.
I attempted to find some relevant information abut the feature you mentioned above, unsuccessfully. How can I utilize this feature in PiTiVi?
You cannot yet, it is only in the development version.