quick_cut

Project Overview

Quick Cut turns the mpv player into a lightweight cutting desk: you drop in and out points while playback continues, and get trimmed video, audio, animations, images, or subtitles out the other end without importing media or creating a project. The script is pure Lua, and the studio, timeline, crop box, and export panel are all drawn on mpv OSD layers. Changing only in and out points uses stream copy by default, finishing in seconds with no quality loss; filters, speed changes, or frame accuracy switch it to re-encoding. Without FFmpeg it falls back to the mpv built-in encoder and greys out what that path cannot do.

Item	Value
Version	v1.2
Host	mpv 0.38 or later
External tools	FFmpeg and FFprobe 5.1 or later, optional
License	MIT
Tested platform	Windows

Playback, marking, and export all happen in the same window.

Supported Hosts

• mpv native OSC: bind script-binding quick_cut/cut_menu in input.conf to open the studio
• uosc: add button:quick_cut to controls= in script-opts/uosc.conf for a toolbar button
• ModernZ and other OSC front ends: bind the same key as with the native OSC, since no specific UI is required
• mpv 0.38 floor: timecode entry depends on mp.input, so older builds still load the script but lose those input dialogs

Key Features

• Mark while playing: [ and ] set in and out points, ENTER adds a clip, and split, delete, reorder, undo, and redo are all available
• On-screen cropping: drag a crop box over the video with fixed ratios such as 16:9, 9:16, 4:3, 1:1, 21:9, or a custom rectangle
• Stream copy: changing only in and out points remuxes in seconds, with in points limited by keyframe positions
• Cut-point offset removal: for H.264 sources a short partial re-encode of the opening GOP aligns the copy in point to the exact frame
• Speed export: 0.25x to 4x with atempo compensation, so audio keeps its pitch
• Multiple output types: video, audio, animations, image sequences, contact sheets, single frames, and subtitles each have their own parameters
• Target file size: enter a size and the script derives a bitrate from total duration, defaulting to 50 MB with two-pass encoding
• Session memory: progress is written to quick_cut_sessions.json, restoring clips and crop the next time you open the file

Install and Enable

1. Put the whole quick_cut folder into the mpv scripts/ directory, or portable_config/scripts/quick_cut/ in portable mode
2. The regular install path is %AppData%/mpv/scripts/quick_cut/; on macOS and Linux use scripts/ inside the config directory
3. uosc users add button:quick_cut to controls= in script-opts/uosc.conf
4. Other front ends write c script-binding quick_cut/cut_menu into input.conf
5. Copy script-opts/quick_cut.conf into the mpv script-opts/ folder, edit as needed, and restart mpv
6. Play a video, then press c or click the control bar button to enter the studio

Permissions and Scope

• Config writes: only quick_cut_sessions.json and preset files are written in the script folder, leaving existing mpv config untouched
• External processes: export launches FFmpeg or an mpv encoder process per clip, with the video encoding window started minimized
• Offline operation: no telemetry or network calls, and icons come from the bundled fonts/Quickcut_icons.ttf
• File protection: existing outputs are never overwritten, since duplicate names get _cut_1, _cut_2, and so on

Notes

• Keyframe limit: stream-copy in points can only land on keyframes, so use re-encoding or cut-point offset removal when frame accuracy matters
• Missing FFmpeg: without FFmpeg, stream copy, merged export, subtitle export, and two-pass size targeting are unavailable and greyed out
• Subtitle formats: image subtitles such as PGS can only be copied into mkv and cannot be converted to SRT
• Platform testing: development and testing happen on Windows only, and the macOS and Linux adaptation code has not been fully verified