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Comment by ilaksh | Hacker News Reader

Technically a front end for ffmpeg which does the actual video cutting. Like most other tools like this.

I was hired recently to author a set of DVDs (yes, I know!), discovered there's almost no commercial software still available outside of Scenarist and TMPGEnc, and tried a dozen modern projects while putting together a FOSS workflow, just in case I couldn't the conjure CDs, licenses, and keys for software I hadn't needed in a decade+.

vidcutter ultimately didn't help in this process. I built it from source and then tried the flatpak, but for all of its beauty, it hung or crashed when importing common but dated formats and containers, handling more than a few clips, and didn't allow precise jogging for splitting (when it didn't hang or crash). It's good for trimming up a smartphone video, but it's not on par with an NLE.

I ended up giving up and scripting out most of the project in ffmpeg and dvdauthor. If you know how to use core utilities, it's such an exercise in tedium struggling against underdeveloped front ends.

FWIW, LosslessCut works similarly to Vidcutter except it’s functionality is flawless (within limitations) in my experience. Def worth a look if you run into a similar need in the future.

LosslessCut hasn't failed me yet and barely crashes. No matter how bad or corrupted the source is! (Looking at you over-the-air)

After the recent experience, I decided to build an image for a dedicated legacy media workstation. Thanks for the rec, it'll definitely get added.

Excellent idea. Let me know if you end up posting it anywhere — I deal with legacy media all day and am always looking for new tricks.

+1 I love LosslessCut. Am using it for many months now and it has never let me down. It's a very polished piece of software which is in active developement!

I've also noticed playback of DVDs is terrible these days too. Long ago I ripped my DVD collection to iso files so I could preserve the full experience of the menus, etc. But almost nothing these days supports DVD iso playback and menus, not even VLC! The only software I can get to work to play them is Kodi. It's wild how much DVD software has disappeared, I don't remember it being this bad 20 years ago.

Mount the ISO as a drive and play it ? It's a double click worth of effort on windows, and probably one mount call away on linux

I was trying to play it on Android devices and can't mount it unfortunately.

What about mpv? I don't have a DVD iso to test at the moment..

In my experience mpv and VLC will handle .IFO files in DVD’s VIDEO_TS folder structure just fine.

You could open the .VOB files directly, but that’s more cumbersome.

VLC does support DVD menus... maybe not from iso, but you can play ripped DVDs with menus from VIDEO_TS folders.

Why you'd want DVD menus in the first place, though...

Same here. I've once `dd`'d a VideoCD into a `*.iso` file and there's seemingly no app that can read it now. VLC only detects the video stream and plays whatever frames it can decode, but since it's mixed with CD layout and filesystem stuff, it's rather garbled.

I can't mount the file and also can't find any software that can make sense out of the raw CD sectors. Very strange.

We found DVD Styler [0] to work well enough for making dvds of our church service for elderly who had no internet during pandemic.

[0] https://www.dvdstyler.org/en/

That’s not to say it doesn’t provide value. Using raw ffmpeg is a pretty technical task, with lots of pitfalls, and not for your average user.

And it gives you nice drag/drop/seek/preview type stuff.

That said, since I've been using an AI assisted terminal (warp.dev currently) my use of GUI wrappers for different tools has faded quite a bit. I like being able to "Clip 0:10 through 0:30 of file.mp4 and turn it into a web optimized gif", and this NLP workflow works as a "wrapper" for almost any CLI. It's a nice interface without the loss of any functionality.

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