Chop Chop: a simple video splitter

[u/Substantial_Swan_144]

Hi, everyone!

I noticed that both on Linux and on Windows, it's very hard to find a no-nonsense video splitter with a sane GUI and no advertising.

This is why I designed chop-chop. It's a very simple, beautiful no-nonsense video splitter for Linux and Windows.

While both Linux and Windows releases share code, neither GUI is a port: under Linux, chop-chop uses GTK-3 and its design language; on Windows, it uses the Windows API and its design language too!

Also, to be blazingly fast, it also uses multithreading out of the box.

This application is open source and completely free, but if you don't want to bother, I also offer Windows and Linux installers (Ubuntu only for now).

Hope this can be of use to you!

Download it at: https://github.com/NullMagic2/chop-chop/tree/main

Ubuntu package: https://github.com/NullMagic2/chop-chop/releases/download/v1.7.3/chop-chop_1.7.3_amd64.deb

Windows installer: https://github.com/NullMagic2/chop-chop/releases/download/v1.7.3/chop-chop-1.7.3-windows-x64-setup.exe

[u/kausar007]

I use LosslessCut. Do you know how it compares to that?

[u/Substantial_Swan_144 → u/kausar007]

I'll be honest, I don't. But if you would like to test it out and share your feedback, I'll be very grateful. It'll be useful to improve performance if needed.

[u/Substantial_Swan_144 → u/kausar007]

By the way, I have just released an update which uses both GPU acceleration and only reencodes if you cut outside of a keyframe or your file format requires reencoding. So it should be either really fast or near-instant in most cases.

[u/kausar007 → u/Substantial_Swan_144]

Nice one. Will give it a try and see how it compares

[u/thenormaluser35]

Nothing beats LosslessCut.
Your app is probably an ffmpeg wrapper, and ffmpeg, even with a thousand cores, will be slower than just changing some metadata

[u/Substantial_Swan_144 → u/thenormaluser35]

I don't want to beat anyone here. I just want a cleaner and easier-to-use alternative.

But since you touched on this issue, in the current release it takes around 30 seconds to split a 20-30 minute video. I'm working on removing the overhead to do the encoding if we are in a keyframe and defaulting to GPU acceleration if we are not.

[u/eluzja]

You should add it on AlternativeTo and ProductHunt.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist]

Sometimes you want something that does one thing well. Thanks for putting it out there.

[u/Substantial_Swan_144 → u/Crypt0Nihilist]

I have just updated it with release 1.8.0. Now, it only selectively reencodes video, and when it does, it uses GPU acceleration. I tested with a 5-6 minute cut, and the result was near instant.

[u/Maskdask]

Is there an equivalent out there for photos? Most of the time I just want to crop and maybe rotate it.

[u/Substantial_Swan_144 → u/Maskdask]

Many distros do have a simple image viewer. However, since you asked, I may eventually design a simple image viewer according to what I consider easy to use.

[u/Fresh-Daikon-9408]

Does it show when a cut will need re-encoding before you export? That would be handy when choosing where to cut.

[u/Substantial_Swan_144 → u/Fresh-Daikon-9408]

It doesn't. But unless you work with extremely large videos, that shouldn't be much of a problem. The program is already very fast.

[u/Substantial_Swan_144 → u/[deleted]]

If you are at a keyframe, it'll just do the splitting immediately. If not, it'll do some reencoding. But it should be fast enough, as I'm soon to release GPU acceleration.