How to cut/crop/trim and record videos using VLC on Linux(Ubuntu) and Windows

Ever wanted to cut videos into pieces or chunks and found out that the process can be complex especially on Linux systems .You can usually do such tasks on Linux systems like Debian or Ubuntu using command line tools such as the powerful and famous FFmpeg but the task can be daunting and not everyone feels very comfortable using these advanced tools so what’s the alternative ?

A simple , user friendly and cross platform alternative is VLC .VLC is a powerful media player that’s available on both Linux and Windows .But it can be used for more than just playing videos for tasks like cutting and trimming videos into pieces so how you can use VLC to cut or trim a video ?

The process is very simple and straightforward but you need a bit of configuration first .

Go ahead and open up the video file that you want to cut using VLC player .

Select the View Menu then click on the advanced control option

Now you can see some new controls in your player just above the playing controls

The first button is a recording button that you can use to record a piece of your video when playing it .This will preserve your original video and record just the chunk you want which will be available on your videos folder .

So you simply start playing the video and whenever you are at some point where you want to cut the video you just press the red record button and let the player continues playing the video until you arrive at the point where you want to stop cutting and press the red button again to stop .That’s it

now go to your videos folder to find your video .

You can change the default output directory by simply going to Tools > Preferences

Next choose the Input/Codecs tab and then look for Record directory and filename and browse for your folder

After that you just hit save to confirm you change .

You can also use VLC under Windows to cut or crop your videos in the same way i’ve shown here .

Conclusion

Thanks for reading and i hope this is was helpful for you .I just wanted to share with you this trick i’ve discovered recently which is simple and requires less time .Before that i was using FFmpeg to do cutting and cropping which is really a powerful tool for anything related to editing and converting videos but for simple tasks such as cropping and cutting you can just use VLC .

Author: Ahmed Bouchefra Follow @ahmedbouchefra
Date: 25 Jan 2017