LosslessCut

Open Source Alternative to Adobe Premiere Pro

Language

TypeScript

Stars

31113

Watchers

31113

Forks

1460

Open Issues

198

Last Updated

5/12/2025

REAMDE.md

LosslessCut

The swiss army knife of lossless video/audio editing

Thanks to my supporters and everyone who purchased LosslessCut!

screenshot

LosslessCut aims to be the ultimate cross platform FFmpeg GUI for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitle and other related media files. The main feature is lossless trimming and cutting of video and audio files, which is great for saving space by rough-cutting your large video files taken from a video camera, GoPro, drone, etc. It lets you quickly extract the good parts from your videos and discard many gigabytes of data without doing a slow re-encode and thereby losing quality. There are also many more use cases. Everything is extremely fast because it does an almost direct data copy, fueled by the awesome FFmpeg which does all the grunt work.

Features
Example lossless use cases
Download
Supported formats
Documentation & getting started
Video demos
Featured
Attributions

Features

Lossless cutting of most video and audio formats
Smart cut (experimental)
Losslessly cut out parts of video/audio (for cutting away commercials etc.)
Losslessly rearrange the order of video/audio segments
Lossless merge/concatenation of arbitrary files (with identical codecs parameters, e.g. from the same camera)
Lossless multi track/stream editing
- Combine arbitrary tracks from multiple files (ex. add music or subtitle track to a video file)
- Remove unneeded tracks
- Replace or re-encode only some tracks
- Extract all tracks from a file (extract video, audio, subtitle, attachments and other tracks from one file into separate files)
View technical data about all tracks. Edit file metadata, per-track metadata and per-track disposition
Select video/audio tracks for playback. Playback multiple audio tracks simultaneously.
Fast multi-file workflow (note: no mass/batch export yet)
Keyboard shortcut workflow
Losslessly remux video/audio into a different container (file) format
Take full-resolution snapshots from videos in JPEG/PNG format (low or high quality)
Export ranges of video frames to images (every nth frame, second, by scene change, best thumbnails)
- Export only from a selected time range (segment)
- Optionally include original timestamps in image file names
Manual input of cutpoint times
Apply a per-file timecode offset (and auto load timecode from file)
Change rotation/orientation metadata in videos
Timeline zoom and frame/keyframe jumping for cutting around keyframes
Video thumbnails and audio waveform
Saves per project cut segments to project file
View FFmpeg last command log so you can modify and re-run recent commands on the command line
Undo/redo
Advanced segment query and mutation JS-based expression language.
Give labels to cut segments, annotate with tags
Import/export segments: MP4/MKV chapter marks, Text file, YouTube, CSV, CUE, XML (DaVinci, Final Cut Pro) and more
MKV/MP4 embedded chapters marks editor
View subtitles
Customizable keyboard hotkeys
Black scene detection, silent audio detection, and scene change detection
Divide timeline into segments of length L, size (X MB), N number of segments or even randomized segments!
Speed up / slow down video or audio file (changing FPS)
Basic CLI and HTTP API
Show (DJI) embedded GPS track on a map
Losslessly Download videos over HTTP (e.g. HLS .m3u8)

Example lossless use cases

Cut out commercials from a recorded TV show (and re-format from TS to MP4)
Remove audio tracks from a file
Extract music track from a video and cut it to your needs
Add music to a video (or replace existing audio track)
Combine audio and video tracks from separate recordings
Include an external subtitle into a video
Quickly change a H264/H265 MKV video to MOV or MP4 for playback on iPhone
Import a list of cut times from other tool as a EDL (edit decision list, CSV) and run these cuts with LosslessCut
Export a list of cut times as a CSV EDL and process these in another tool
Quickly cut a file by its MP4/MKV chapters
Quickly cut a YouTube video by its chapters (or music times from a comment)
Change the language of a file's audio/subtitle tracks
Attach cover art / thumbnail to videos / audio from an external JPEG file or from a frame on the timeline
Change author, title, GPS position, recording time of a video
Fix rotation of a video that has the wrong orientation flag set
- Great for rotating phone videos that come out the wrong way without actually re-encoding the video.
Loop a video / audio clip X times quickly without re-encoding
- See #284
Convert a video or parts of it into X image files (not lossless)
Losslessly split a video into one file per scene (note you probably have to shift segments, see #330.)
Cut away silent parts of an audio/video
Split video into segments to for example respect Twitter's 140 second limit
Annotate each segment with one or more tags, then use those tags to organize your segments or use it to create an output folder structure or hierarchy for your segments.

Export cut times as YouTube Chapters

Export with Merge and "Create chapters from merged segments" enabled
Open the exported file and select "Import chapters" in the dialog
File -> Export project -> YouTube Chapters

Re-encode only the audio track, keeping the lossless video track

First export each track as individual files. Then use Handbrake or similar to re-encode the audio file (if mp4 file, encode as AAC.) Then open the extracted video stream in LosslessCut. The open your encoded audio file and select "Include all tracks from the new file". Then export.

Advanced multi-step workflows

Tip: you can use LosslessCut in multiple passes in order to achieve separate trimming of individual tracks:

Open a file an export all tracks as individual files
Open the exported track files independently and cut them as desired
Add the track back to the video and combine them to one output video

Download

If you want to support my continued work on LosslessCut, and you want the advantage of a secure and simple installation process with automatic, stable updates, consider getting it from your favorite store:

For Linux these are some alternatives:

If you prefer to download the executables manually, this will of course always be free (see also supported operating systems):

macOS: Intel / Apple Silicon DMG (note that PKG does not work)
Windows: 7zip (Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 is no longer supported after v3.50.0)
Linux: x64 tar.bz2 / x64 AppImage / arm64 tar.bz2 / Raspberry Pi armv7l
More releases - Note that APPX (Windows) and PKG (macOS) do not work)
Latest nightly builds 🧪

Difference between App Stores and GitHub download? Please see FAQ.

LosslessCut is maintained by me alone and will always remain free and open source. If it's useful to you, consider supporting my work. Alternatively donate to FFmpeg because they are doing the world a huge favor.

Paypal | crypto | more

Supported formats

LosslessCut uses the Chromium browser's HTML5 video player, and not all formats/codecs are natively supported. Generally, the following file formats work: MP4, MOV, WebM, Matroska, OGG and WAV. Audio codecs: FLAC, MP3, Opus, PCM, Vorbis and AAC. Video codecs: H264, AV1, Theora, VP8, VP9 and H265 (with hardware decoder). Learn the difference between a codec and a format. Codecs and formats not listed above can still be converted to a supported format/codec from the File menu (try the option Fastest: FFmpeg-assisted playback first). A low quality version of the file will then be created and opened in the player. Note that the actual cut/export operation will still be performed on the original file, so it will be lossless. This allows for potentially opening any file that FFmpeg is able to decode.