LosslessCut, the Swiss army knife for lossless video and audio editing

In the next article we are going to take a look at LosslessCut. This tool aims to be a graphical user interface for ffmpeg. It is cross-platform for extremely fast and lossless operations on video, audio, subtitles and other related multimedia files.

This program will allow us to quickly extract the good parts of our videos and will give us the possibility of discarding many gigabytes of data without having to re-encode. We can also add a music track or subtitles to our video without the need to encode. Everything is extremely fast, because it makes an almost direct data copy, driven by the incredible ffmpeg that does all the heavy lifting.

General characteristics of LosslessCut

• This program offers us the possibility of being able to carry out lossless cuts of most video and audio formats.
• The program is available in different languages, even though I did not find Spanish.
• Lossless merge / concatenation of arbitrary files.
• Lossless streaming editing. We will can combine arbitrary tracks from multiple files.
• We can losslessly extract all tracks from a file (video, audio, subtitles and other tracks from one file in separate files).

• We will be able to take Full resolution snapshots of JPEG / PNG format videos.
• Manual entry of cut-off times.
• We can apply timecode offset per file, and automatically load the timecode from the file.
• We will have the possibility of change metadata in videos.
• It will give us the possibility of see technical data on all transmissions.
• Timeline zoom and keyframe / frame jump for a precise cut around the keyframe.
• Save cut segments per project in the project file.
• It will give us the options of undo / redo.

• VIEW segment details, export / import cut segments as CSV.
• Import segments from: MP4 / MKV chapters, text file, YouTube, CSV, CUE, XML (Da Vinci, Final Cut Pro)
• Video thumbnails and audio waveform.

These are just some of the features of the program. To consult them all in detail, users can go to the project GitHub page.

How to use LosslessCut in Ubuntu

Download as AppImage package

We can download the AppImage file for Gnu / Linux from the following link. We can also open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and run wget to download the AppImage package:

wget https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut/releases/download/v3.27.0/LosslessCut-linux.AppImage

At the end of the download of the .appimage package, we will have to grant execute permissions in the file properties. Another possibility to give the necessary permission will be to open a terminal and execute the command:

sudo chmod +x LosslessCut-linux.AppImage

After to launch the program, in the same terminal we will execute:

./LosslessCut-linux.AppImage

Install as snap package

This tool is available from Ubuntu software option like snap package. However, the package version is a bit dated.

To install LosslessCut as a snap package we can also open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the command:

sudo snap install losslesscut

After the installation, we can run this program searching for your available launcher on our computer.

uninstall

For remove the snap package from this program, we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the command:

sudo snap remove losslesscut

Install as Flatpak

Also we can find this program available on Flatub. If we want to install the program, we will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute the command:

flatpak install flathub no.mifi.losslesscut

After the installation, to launch the program, we will only need to write in the terminal:

flatpak run no.mifi.losslesscut

uninstall

For remove this program installed as Flatpak package We will only have to open a terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and execute:

flatpak uninstall no.mifi.losslesscut

LosslessCut is a multiplatform tool that has been created to trim / cut lossless video and audio files. This software is extremely fast, and does the job in seconds without losing quality, because it simply cuts the data stream and copies it directly. For get more information about this project, users can go to the project website.