How to remove a part of a video using ffmpeg

Author: Solène

Date: 02 October 2019

Tags: ffmpeg

Comment on Mastodon

If you want to remove parts of a video, you have to cut it into pieces and then

merge the pieces, so you can avoid parts you don't want.

The command is not obvious at all (like in all ffmpeg uses), I found some parts

on differents areas of the Internet.

Split in parts, we want to keep from 00:00:00 to 00:30:00 and 00:35:00 to 00:45:00

ffmpeg -i source_file.mp4 -ss 00:00:00 -t 00:30:00 -acodec copy -vcodec copy part1.mp4

ffmpeg -i source_file.mp4 -ss 00:35:00 -t 00:10:00 -acodec copy -vcodec copy part2.mp4

The -ss parameter tells ffmpeg where to start the video and -t parameter tells

it about the duration.

Then, merge the files into one file:

printf "file %s\n" part1.mp4 part2.mp4 > file_list.txt

ffmpeg -f concat -i file_list.txt -c copy result.mp4

instead of printf you can write into file_list.txt the list of files like this:

file /path/to/test1.mp4

file /path/to/test2.mp4