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If you find video editors to be confusing and all you need is to just cut a portion of a video, you can try LosslessCut, an application available for Linux, Windows and Mac.

LosslessCut video cutter Ubuntu

LosslessCut was especially created to make it easy to quickly extract parts of video files from a video camera, GoPro, drone, and so on, without losing video quality.

The application is based on Chromium, using a HTML5 video player, and it uses FFmpeg for cutting the videos.

According to its GitHub page, LosslessCut doesn't re-encode or decode the videos, making it very fast and especially useful for large videos.

LosslessCut video cutter Ubuntu

LosslessCut features:
  • lossless video cutting
  • take JPG snapshots of the video (at least on Linux, the snapshots - which are created in the same folder as the video -, are actually PNG, so if you have trouble opening them, rename the files from .jpg to .png);
  • supports the following formats/codecs: MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, OGG, WAV, MP3, AAC, H264, Theora, VP8, VP9. A complete list can be found HERE (since it uses Chromium and the HTML5 video player, not all formats supported by FFmpeg work);
  • keyboard shortcuts (press "h" to see a list of keyboard shortcuts).

To use LosslessCut, add the video either by drag and drop or from its menu, then simply select the start (represented by the "<" icon in the LosslessCut user interface - 1 in the screenshot below) and end (">" - 2) time of the video you want to cut, then click the scissors (3) icon to export it:

LosslessCut video cutter Ubuntu

Unless you choose a different output folder, the video should be exported in the same directory as the original.


Download LosslessCut


Download LosslessCut (binaries available for Linux, Windows and Mac, along with source code)

To run it on Linux, extract the downloaded archive and simply double click on the "LosslessCut" executable to launch the application.