I have been using Ubuntu as my main OS for the past year, but have often relied on my old MacBook for doing various things that I haven’t easily figured out how to do in Linux. One of those things is to trim video files non-destructively. This is quite simple to do in QuickTime, although Apple now forces you to save the file with a QuickTime container (.mov) even though there is still only MPEG-4 compression in the file (h.264).
There are numerous linux video editors available, but most of these offer way too many features and hence the need to re-compress the files. But I have found two solutions that work well.
The first one, ffmpeg, should be obvious, although I hadn’t thought that it could also do trimming. However, I often like GUI software, and I have found that Avidemux can do what I need very easily. Just open a file, add start and stop markers for the section to be trimmed, and click save. As opposed to QuickTime, it also allows for saving directly to MPEG-4 files (.mp4) without recoding the file.
There was only one thing that I had to look up, and that was the need for starting the trim section on a keyframe in the video. This is quite obvious when wanting to avoid re-encoding the file, but unfortunately Avidemux doesn’t help in explaining this but only gives an error message. The trick was to use the >> arrows to jump to the next keyframe, and then the file saved nicely.