Contents

How to cut (or trim) video with FFmpeg

Contents

The browser history tells me I’ve visted this FFmpeg HOWTO page many times as I get handy with the tool:

  1. My brain works on absolute, not relative, time so I’d much rather be able to directly indicate when to start cutting -ss, and when to stop -to;
  2. I also want to only copy the original video/audio, without any re-encoding, hence the -c:v copy -c:a copy part.

Putting it all together: we take some input file foo.webm, cut from the 10-second mark onwards, copy its video/audio, resulting in a 59-second long output file bar.webm:

ffmpeg -i foo.webm \
  -ss 00:00:10 -to 01:09 \
  -c:v copy -c:a copy \
  bar.webm