LosslessCut is one of the most popular video editors out there. If you’re not familiar with this utility, this might come as a bit of a surprise, since it’s not the best-looking, nor is it the most advanced or all-rounded video editor out there.
The reason why LosslessCut is so popular is that its primary focus is cutting videos and reassembling scenes in selectable order (as well as other nifty little tricks that we’ll mention below). In short, we wouldn’t be wrong if you would think of LosslessCut as being the swiss army knife of lossless audio and video trimming and cutting.
Another aspect that makes LosslessCut such a valuable tool is the fact that it costs nothing. It’s also open-source, so anyone can check out all its internal components (or even add improvements on top of the current project), and, best of all, it works on all major OSes: Windows, macOS, and most Linux distros.
As mentioned before, LosslessCut’s superpower is its ability to extract the good parts from a video, and discard the rest without doing a slow re-encode and therefore affecting the quality of the video in question. This is all possible thanks to FFmpeg, one of the best multimedia editing frameworks out there.
Don’t be fooled by the pretty appalling GUI, LosslessCut can do a lot. With its help, you can remove audio tracks from a file, cut out various sections from a video or recording, and extract the audio from a video and cut it accordingly.
You can add music to videos, combine audio and video tracks from separate recordings, cut files by their MP4/MKV chapters, attach covert art or thumbnails to videos and audio files, as well as tweak the metadata (author, title, time of the recording, etc.).
There are other nice features as well. The app features a bath view for fast multi-file workflow, black scene detection, basic CLI support, keyboard shortcut workflow, undo/redo actions, and the option to add labels to cut segments, as well as import or export segments.
What makes LosslessCut so good is its ability to not be intimidating to first-timers, all while providing enough editing firepower for advanced users who require a lot more.
Sure, there are some niggles here and there (i.e. the input File menu is somewhat awkward as it does not filter compatible files), and there’s no getting around its not-so-good GUI, but other than that, LosslessCut really delivers on its “promise.”
