Lazycut: A simple terminal video trimmer using FFmpeg

Invoking ffmpeg, gzip and tar commands is a sort of reverse Turing test for LLMs

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.

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.

I think this is the first instance I've seen of an actual terminal video player. Very fun to play with.

I asked about this tool 3 days ago, HN is a magical place! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363432

On MacOs I just press space and trim with finder. Even avoids re-compressing.

I have been using this one[0] and it is small, fast, and seems to work pretty great for me so far.

[0]https://github.com/wong-justin/vic

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.

Having to separately download ffmpeg in the windows distribution does not really make sense

Just bundle it

I've been using ffmpeg with claude as video editor for long time.

I guess I can find another implementation to combine trimmed parts after taking out certain scenes?